Spaces Between Days
by Katowisp
Summary: What was the use of walls if they could be torn down so easily? And what was the use of running from the past, if it still catches up? Eventual Steve/Loki (Book 2 in the Saga)
1. A Million Numbered Doors

Disclaimers: These characters are not my own, sadly.

Thanks SO MUCH to my editor, Valylene, of whom has made this a medicore work into something much better.

Part I

_I've seen a million numbered doors on the horizon_

_Now which is the future you've chosen before you gone dying?_

_I'll tell you about a secret I've been undermining,_

_every little lie in this world comes from dividing._

-Truth by Alexander Ebert

Loki was loathe to admit that he had anything in common with a certain bonded Steve Rogers, but when the human suggested they return to Stark Tower without fanfare, Loki quietly agreed.

Loki was little inclined to return to Midgard at all, much less back to the tower owned by the only human on the planet possibly more annoying than Rogers, but while Loki had learned how to rebel against Odin, his mother continued to stymie him. She'd knit her brows, mouth pinched, arms folded and level him with an even _stare_.

Even though Loki had outwitted Hreidmar, Fáfnir, Skadi and countless others, he had never learned how to outwit Queen Frigga: had never learned how to tell her no. When she told him he'd be going back with Rogers to Midgard, he had little choice but to agree. She said he owed it to the human—and if anyone, even his mother, expected him to owe anything to anyone, they were sorely mistaken—but Loki couldn't shake the uneasy weight that had settled onto his shoulders since Rogers' sacrifice.

Loki was convinced no man could be so altruistic, and so he agreed to go back to Midgard for two reasons: the first was to discover Rogers' ulterior motives in saving him, and the second was to unearth enough about the Avengers that when he took his revenge, it would be absolute.

They arrived in front of Grand Central Station with so little remark as to be hardly noticeable at all. Loki had never favored Heimdall's rather ostentatious arrivals and departures and he had found, quite pleasantly, that his way of moving through worlds proved much more successful.

He'd cloaked them both with the simplest of glamour spells, guaranteeing nosy pedestrians would recognize neither of them.

Rogers took the lead, although, as it was the tallest building in the city and the only one with a garish "A" (the rest as yet unfixed), Loki hardly felt it was needed: he would not lose track of where Stark's Tower was.

Rogers crossed the long blocks, hands shoved in his jacket, eyes distant in an expression Loki had come to recognize: the Captain was lost in thought and would speak little, if at all, on their journey to Stark Tower. This suited Loki just fine, and he didn't offer any commentary as he noted the changes since he'd been here last.

They had been gone several months by Midgard's time, and Loki was quietly impressed with how much rebuilding had occurred since then. Without either the skills of the dwarves or magic, it was hard work. Humanity's ability to rebuild after they had lost everything was something Loki had always grudgingly respected.

By the time they reached Stark Tower, the sun was at its apex, and the tower's shadow was almost non-existent. Sunlight reflected off windows and smooth silver siding, and Loki squinted as the light caught his eyes just right. Rogers stopped, a muscle moving in his jaw as he assayed the tower with unreadable eyes.

Just as Loki was about to comment, Rogers flashed him a toothy grin that failed to meet his eyes.

"Welcome home."

Loki sneered.

"After you, Captain."

Rogers crossed the plaza and pushed the broad glass doors open in a display of confidence betrayed by the tenseness of his shoulders. Loki idly wondered why the homecoming wasn't all roses and sunshine for the Captain, who had spoken in depth about New York and his friends.

The smooth mechanical clicking of weapons lowering from the ceiling and cocking killed Loki's line of thought. He had just thrown up his arms, the words of an offensive spell on his lips when Rogers looked at him sharply. He'd raised his own hands in a position of surrender, and although Loki suspected the klaxons sounding above them was probably meant to be disorienting to possible attackers and not a warning system for Stark, they did their job well.

Loki couldn't hear the words spilling from Rogers' moving mouth, but his body language was clear enough: "_wait" _and _"don't attack"_.

Loki growled, his fists clenching at his sides as the Avengers poured into the room.

Besides Stark's gaudy suit, everyone else looked largely the same but the hulking green figure of the one that had bested him was missing. His eyes fell on the unassuming man that lingered behind the group in the crumpled white shirt and glasses.

Thinking he could harness chaos had been folly; even the green beast's owner could not bend the creature to his will.

"_Steve?_" Stark's disbelief echoed, tinny, from the helmet, and he remained in an offensive posture, arm extended and blue energy held in the palm of his hand.

Loki could see confusion in the set of his shoulders and the way he dropped his armed hand slightly, the blue light fading to a pulsing orb.

"Is this a trick?" Stark demanded, tone cross behind the obvious confusion that leaked through.

"No trick," Steve lowered his hands. "I'm back." His lips quirked in an unsure smile as he added, "Again."

"With _Loki?_" Barton's cold voice came from above, and Loki didn't have to look up to know that there was an arrow aimed at his heart. In his bid to win the team, Barton would be his greatest obstacle.

"He can't be controlling Steve," The woman—Romanov, Loki remembered—observed him from where she flanked Stark. "He doesn't have the tesseract."

She was sweating slightly and her hair was matted to her forehead. Her attire clearly indicated she'd just come from a workout session and Loki felt oddly victorious he'd managed to catch them so off guard.

"I'm not being controlled," Rogers said. "It's just—" he trailed off for so long that Loki looked over at him in bemusement as Rogers clearly sought the right words. "It's just... a lot has happened."

He winced, and Loki's amusement only grew.

"No shit." Tony lowered his arm, the blue light completely fading, but he didn't move to breach the space between them.

For all the hatred and discontent Loki had caused, the team's focus was entirely on Rogers, and Loki began to realize why the human was so tense.

There was a sudden commotion, and a side door, previously unnoticed, clanged open. Thor was there with all the energy of a late summer storm. Paying little heed to the lines drawn between the fragmented team, Thor was through the door and across the floor in a few long strides.

"Brother!" He exclaimed delightedly, pulling Loki into a breath-stealing hug.

Loki gritted his teeth as he tolerated Thor's theatrics. Loki had never found solace in hugs the way Thor did. He usually didn't suffer them at all, but he felt strangely guilty of the way he'd left things with his brother.

"Get _off_ me," he hissed, sure he might suffocate if he allowed Thor to carry on for too long.

It was the icebreaker the team had needed. Ignoring Loki, they swarmed around Rogers, taking turns in welcoming him back. Stark prodded Rogers several times in the chest.

"You _feel_ real," he acknowledged with childish curiosity. "Not one of Loki's illusions."

Thor loosened the hug, instead clasping his heavy arms on Loki's shoulders, his face close and beaming.

Thor's smiles could light a world, and Loki had spent his childhood devising pranks that would bring a smile to Thor's face.

There had been a time, briefly, when Loki had been the highlight of Thor's day, but then Odin had told them the days of pranks were of the past and they needed to grow up. Loki had never forgiven their father for the remark.

Not long after, Thor dogged Odin's every footstep, learning what it meant to be a man and a king, and had forgotten all about Loki and his escapades.

"We thought you dead! Even mother did not know what lands you trod," Thor declared, impassioned. His arms were heavy on Loki's shoulders, and he was not sure he could bear the weight. "Father sent his ravens across all the realms and still you were shielded from him!"

"What are you doing with him?" Banner's soft, firm voice cut through Thor's clamoring as he warmly shook Rogers' hand.

The Avengers fell silent as they awaited Rogers' answer. Rogers glanced at Loki, who shrugged. This was Rogers' battle: he had been the one to insist they return to his team. It stemmed, Loki was sure, from some sort of misplaced sense of duty that drove Rogers to lead this group of unhappy misfits.

"It's a long story," Rogers began, his eyes travelling upward and landing on Barton before making an effort of meeting the gaze of each teammate in turn. "How long were we gone?"

"Six months," Stark keyed the visor down. He pressed a button, dissolving the suit into a neat suitcase, revealing a casually dressed Stark, hands black with grease. Loki could see something in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

"It felt like a lifetime," Rogers' shoulders slumped in barely contained relief. He ran his hand through his hair. "I thought it had been longer."

"It was long enough," Stark frowned.

"I think I need a drink," Steve smiled, brighter this time. "Is there any iced tea in the fridge?"

"Uh," Stark shifted his weight as he eyed Loki. "Pepper made some. I think it's still there unless Clint drank it all."

"I didn't," came Barton's tight reply.

"Before I let Loki into my tower, I need to know that _he_—" Stark fluttered a hand at Loki "—won't try and wreck it again. Once you tell your story, we'll decide if he can stay as a team."

Rogers looked mildly surprised at the mention of the team becoming democratic in his absence.

"Sure," he agreed, "Although you should understand, where Loki goes, so do I."

"That so?" his raised eyebrows conveyed his surprise. "Are you two...?" he asked slyly, eyebrows shooting even higher on his forehead, and made a vague motion of his hands. Rogers turned bright red, the tips of his ears tingeing pink Loki smirked.

"No, nothing like that," Rogers denied. "It's complicated."

Stark waggled his brows. "I'm sure it is. Well, it should be a good story, anyway. Too bad you can't have anything stronger than ice tea."

"Yeah," Rogers muttered, shooting a look at Loki before gliding past him and following Stark into the Tower.

Once the team had piled into the den with drinks of choice clasped in tense hands, the atmosphere was anything but warm, and it hadn't gone without notice that Barton remained apart, his bow still at gripped in white-knuckled hands.

Rogers toyed with the glass in his hands, staring into the amber drink, condensation pooling around his fingers. Finally, he looked up.

Licking his lips, he began.

"When we grabbed the mistletoe, it turned out it was cursed, and we were transported to the icy fields of Niflheim, physically bonded together by the plant. Queen Frigga cursed it—" he continued, catching Banner's look of confusion. "—because she had not earned a promise from it that it would not harm Balder."

"Oh, that makes complete sense." Stark rolled his eyes. Irritation flashed across Rogers' face.

"Are you going to let me talk, or are you going to try and be witty at every turn?"

"I wouldn't say _try,_" Stark returned.

"Tony, shut up," Romanov said. Stark glanced at her, but made a motion for Rogers to continue.

Rogers smiled at the agent before he continued. Loki couldn't help but notice that he left out large parts of their adventure.

He made no mention of how they'd almost been lost on the icy fields of Niflheim, or the shades that had dogged them. He kept the mythology to a minimum, expanding instead on how Loki had saved his life on several occasions, and the bond that had forged between them through the curse of the mistletoe and how due to the nature of the curse, the bond would remain until death, and the death of either of them was the death of the other.

Loki remained silent throughout. Rogers made no mention of the trade made for Loki's soul, of their time in Niðavellir and the consumption of the mead of the gods or the apple of eternal youth. He told a story of some poisonous food he'd been given that Loki saved him from. Loki was sure it had happened, because—of Rogers' many faults—the inability to lie ranked the highest.

Still, he had no recollection of the incident. After he had been poisoned by the Nightmare, his recollections increasingly grew more and more absent, and the few clear memories he did have were bizarre.

When Rogers finished, the team remained silent as they gazed thoughtfully at Loki. Barton's face was still screwed up in a scowl, but Thor was beaming, his broad face radiant with a happiness Loki hadn't seen since they were children.

"Brother, I knew you were better than you allowed impression of," he exclaimed happily. Loki clenched his teeth. His brother was so _simple_ and _ignorant_, and it rubbed him in all the wrong ways.

"No," Barton said, his eyes dark, his shoulders tense, the bow string pulled taught with an arrow ready.

Romanov glanced at the sharp shooter and pursed her lips.

"Steve, from what you've told us, you certainly couldn't have survived without his intervention. Still, I've known a lot of guys like him and they're experts at the long con. If he's playing us, we won't know it until it's too late."

Loki had learned never to discount a woman, and Agent Romanov was no exception. She was perhaps the cleverest of the Avengers. She had fooled him once, and if Barton was a time bomb, she was a mine field.

Banner, a man that Loki soon realized only spoke after great consideration said, "This is a team comprised of second chances. We'd be hypocrites if we didn't allow Loki one." He let that stand for a second, then, as an afterthought, added, "We can always smash him again if he's lying."

"No," Stark said vehemently. "No way. This dude trashed my tower."

"I fixed it," Rogers protested.

"Just the barroom!"

"That's all that matters," Romanov pointed out dryly.

Stark huffed.

"He tried to take over the world! Manhattan will take _years_ to fix."

"It was a war, and he lost," Rogers leaned forward. "If we were expected to never forgive the losers, we would never have been reconciled as a nation, to say nothing of our current status with Japan or Germany."

Loki's anger simmered. He was a _god_ and a _prince_, and he wouldn't be ignored by the man that had—and then Rogers shot him a glance that said _We'll get them on our side, just give them time_, and Loki wondered when they had become '_us'_.

"I have a hard time believing _that_." Stark crossed his arms.

Loki remained silent. He could feel Rogers' frustration with his team, wondered why the man was so vehement in his defense. Rogers had more reason than most to despite Loki, in fact, Loki had counted on it.

No soul existed in all the worlds that were as forgiving and accepting as Rogers, and Loki wondered if the human wasn't trying to con him. Looking at Rogers' bland face, his emotions stamped openly upon it, Loki wasn't sure Rogers had the capacity to be so clever.

"If you hadn't been afforded any second chances," Romanov spoke to the man of iron, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, "You'd still be manufacturing weapons for the government."

Starks's arms fell, and as he glared at Romanov he rebutted, "Whose side are you on, anyway?"

Romanov shrugged.

"Fine," Stark relented, throwing his arms up in the air. "Fine! He can… hang around. But he's not one of us, and the moment he shows the slightest sign of betrayal, it's game on. We've already lost too much because of this joker."

"If it comes to it, we'll handle it," Banner's dark promise carried more weight than all of Stark's posturing, and beside Romanov, Loki had to admit that he carried a modicum of respect for the one human that had managed to best him.

"I still say no." Barton snapped before standing stiffly to stalk out of the room.

Loki met Romanov's gaze. She considered him a long time, face indiscernible, before standing to follow Barton out.

Later, when Rogers was cleaning his room of six months of dust, Loki came by his open door and leaned against the doorframe.

"I was wrong."

"Yeah," Rogers agreed. "But about what, specifically?" he glanced up, a dusting rag in one hand, an old picture in the other.

"You _do_ lie."

"I didn't," Rogers protested, but Loki counted it as a victory. If Rogers knew what he was talking about, the man already felt guilty about it. "I just left out parts. There's a difference."

Loki folded his arms, fighting the smirk that threatened. He couldn't bend his bonded to his will just yet, but if he could, it would be a better victory than killing him. He decided to let the thought smolder.

"Your team doesn't trust me."

"You almost wiped out our home _and_ you aimed to enslave us," Rogers reminded him as he rehung the picture. Loki glanced at it. The tiny, black and white faces were unfamiliar to him, and he wondered at their importance.

"Are you not also angry with me?"

Rogers stopped cleaning and straightened, his blue eyes assessing Loki.

"Sure I am, Loki, but what do you want me to do? Continue fighting you until one of us is dead? You've proven that you have both the capacity for great deceit and great heroism. If I hadn't thought you worth saving, I wouldn't have done it."

"You are a fool," Loki sneered. He _wanted_ to hate Rogers, wanted to think that if he acted the part, Rogers would hate him, too, and they could be done with this façade.

"Maybe," Rogers agreed amicably, returning to his work.

His walls were full of his own drawings and some posters that Loki discerned were from his era—a sailor kissing a nurse in the streets of New York, a recruitment poster, black and white pictures of trees with "Ansel Adams" in bold below them.

While many of Steve's own drawings were of his team or period sketches of a 1940's New York, many more were of Peggy. As Rogers moved across the room, he quietly removed all of them. The collected sketches grew into a pile as Loki watched.

When all traces of Peggy were gone, he moved to throw them away.

"I'll take them," Loki offered, wondering why, exactly, the removal of this woman who had meant so much to Rogers once, and now meant nothing, bothered him as it did.

Rogers turned, the sketches in hand.

"Are you sure? They're just some character study. Probably a woman I saw in a book or something. I don't know why I became so obsessed with drawing her. They're not very good."

"When Stark gives me a room, I will need to decorate the walls with something. These will suit."

"You're a little presumptuous, aren't you?" Rogers handed over the pages with a crooked smile. "Think Tony will just hand you a room?"

"I believe he will grow tired of my occupation on his couch."

Loki was right: Stark did grow tired of having to contend with Loki during his trips to the bar.

Loki wasn't sure if it was because Stark didn't like someone knowing how much he drank, or because he felt it was an intrusion on his space, but within a matter of days, Stark arrived with a pillow in hand which he promptly chucked at Loki.

"Wells will direct you to your room," Stark indicated a small robot that whirred over obediently. "I don't want you sleeping on my couch again, getting that greasy hair all over everything."

"Why, Stark, I do believe you're growing fond of me," Loki purred as he followed Wells past the irritated philanthropist.

"Just get the hell out of here," Stark growled.

Loki's room was austere as anything in Stark's tower could be, outfitted only with a bed and what would have been an outstanding view of Manhattan's skyline, had the buildings not been broken and battered, jutting up from the earth like broken bones.

There had been a beauty to it once: even Loki had to acknowledge that. The Aesir had never built something as grand as the steel and cement buildings that the humans were obsessed with: grabs for immortality before their short lives sputtered and closed.

As he settled into his room, his first course of action was to append the pictures of Peggy to his wall with tacks he'd palmed from Rogers' collection. He wasn't sure why he bothered—he hated himself for caring, but Loki felt responsible for remembering the woman Rogers could not.

That night, as he lay in bed and stared up at a ceiling cast in the stark shadows of reflected building lights (darker, Loki thought, than it would once have been), he thought of his brother and the team that was reluctantly adopting him.

While the shadow of destruction and death hung over him, Thor had yet to mention Loki's part in the destruction of Manhattan, of his imprisonment and subsequent escape or the six months of missing time.

Loki knew if he pressed the issue, Thor would wave his hand, butcher an American saying Stark had taught him in their absence like "Let sleeping dogs sleep" or "Let bygones be gone". Loki wanted to hate him for it, but his simpleton of a brother was also his only ally, and Loki had learned from a life trying that he could never make his brother hate him.

As for Rogers' team, they were wise to distrust him. Once Loki discovered how he could break the bond between him and the Captain, he planned to take full advantage of it. In the mean time, he was curious enough to find out what drove Rogers and resolute enough to follow through in whatever plan would follow. He would be there when Rogers revealed a kink in his armor, showed the world (and Loki, a part of him whispered) that the man wasn't the paragon of virtue he attempted to be.

The humans had a saying he appreciated: revenge was a dish best served cold.

And Loki... he could wait.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

On a Saturday morning, not long after the team's reluctant acceptance (if not their approval) of Loki's presence in the Tower, Loki sauntered through the Avengers Mansion and spied Rogers making breakfast in the kitchen. He was mixing something thick and creamy in a red bowl, his expression distant, as if his thoughts were far from the present.

Sneering at himself for even recognizing that expression, Loki leant against the doorway and contemplated mocking the Captain for doing servant's work. Just as he opened his mouth, a smooth, mechanical voice echoed through the room.

"Something is missing, sir."

Steve's back stiffened, his hand freezing over the bowl. "JARVIS," he replied.

Loki felt his hackles rise as he searched for the disembodied voice. He twisted and turned his head as he looked up towards the source of the sound, but there was no one in sight.

"Forgive my intrusion, sir, but you have changed."

Steve slowed from where he was pouring the bowl into the frying pan.

"I'm fine, JARVIS."

"Very well, sir," the voice agreed with startling perception, "Some morning jazz for you? Perhaps some Glen Miller or the Anderson Sisters?"

"Please," Rogers agreed.

The opening bars of a brassy tune filled the air.

"What sorcery is this?" Loki demanded, stepping into the spacious kitchen to straddle a stool at the counter, laconically resting his head in his hand. He thought if he could project a disaffected air, Rogers wouldn't pick up on his discomfort.

Loki had seen many things in his travels, but never before had a room addressed an occupant. Rogers had only turned on the light above the stove, so he was half cast in the cheery yellow light and half in the gray light of a morning sun not yet visible in the sky.

Rogers glanced at him, shaking his head as he added some brightly colored vegetables to the pan from another waiting bowl.

"It's not sorcery, it's JARVIS. Tony made him. He's like... like a ghost. A computer," Steve struggled with the unfamiliar words.

"Like _Star Trek_," Loki guessed, grinning slyly. From Rogers' frown, he could tell he'd had an impact.

Turning slightly so that he could see Loki, Rogers shrugged.

"I don't know?" He eyed Loki. "How do you know about that?"

"I am the Sky Traveler, or have you forgotten? This is not the first time I've been on your planet. I would think by now you would have realized how boring Asgard can be." Loki waved his hand in the air, flicking his fingers dismissively.

"Boring is not the word I would ever use." Rogers turned back to his concoction. "Anyway, I think we would've remembered you," Rogers muttered more to himself than anything else.

Loki rolled his eyes.

"I just know how not to make the disruption Thor does whenever he goes anywhere."

"Ah."

"I am amused you know so little about your own world," Loki smirked as Steve plated up an impressive ensemble of eggs, bacon, toast and hash browns. "I did not ask for this," he eyed the food distrustfully.

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And anyway, I know a lot," Rogers protested, his cheeks flaming red. "SHIELD had me go through a history course of everything I missed when I woke up. I just don't get pop culture."

"A relic of an age past," Loki mused softly, picking up a fork and pushing the food around his plate. The smell was pleasing and it had not been burned. Loki wondered when Rogers had learned to cook.

"Yes," Rogers agreed, staring at the stove.

0o0o0o0o0o0o

On Sundays, Rogers went to church. He'd leave early in the morning before the rest of the team was awake, wearing one of the suits Stark had purchased for him in his absence. He'd tucked a crisp twenty into an envelope that he'd give an attendant at the stairs.

Rogers said Stark had shoved several suits at him.

As they walked to church, the Captain pulled on the hem of his jacket and said, "I wonder if he bought these because he thought I'd returned alive, or he wanted me to be well dressed if I came back on my shield."

Loki was going to comment on how he'd have been better off if it were the latter, but then he'd seen the look in Rogers' eyes, and for some reason, his response didn't seem so witty and so he'd said nothing at all.

More Sundays than not, Loki accompanied him.

In the beginning, it was a mere curiosity, but he came to appreciate the quiet mornings. Rogers also had the strange habit of walking all the way to the stone church and then just standing outside and watching as the congregation filed in. In the many weeks they'd begun this habit, Rogers had yet to breech the threshold.

They'd wait until the bell sounded, and then Rogers would turn away, retracing his steps back to the Tower, only stopping to pick up doughnuts and coffee on the way home.

Loki hadn't asked about this queer habit at first because he convinced himself he didn't care what Rogers did or did not do. Now, the curiosity ate at him.

On a Sunday morning, several weeks post return to Midgard, they walked the streets of New York to the humble, stone building Rogers stopped at, Loki looked askance at his bonded.

"Why do you persist in your believing? You've seen worlds never discussed in your Bible, seen things your God never did. And where is he?"

"He saw us through, didn't He?" Rogers glanced at Loki. "Do you think He should be petty, like you? Is that what you think a god should be?"

"I'm not _petty_." He spat the word indignantly. "I have read your sagas—" Loki stepped around a beggar, a Styrofoam cup muffling the sound of coins that jangled with every shake of his hand. Hesitating for a moment, he realized it was not a compulsion that drove the man to shake the cup but tremors that forbid his hands from obeying.

"The Bible," Rogers corrected, dropping coins in the proffered cup. Loki wanted to tell him that the motion was useless, but then, so was telling Rogers. He was quickly learning that the man had a compulsion of his own in aiding those weaker and less fortunate than he. It was weakness, but Rogers didn't agree.

"As you will. What about Job? Adam and Eve? Those were petty decisions."

Loki had read the Bible in a week. It was not dissimilar from any other mythological text, its claims as ridiculous as any he'd ever read.

He'd found the Old Testament enjoyable enough, with its vindictive god and stories of war and destruction. The entirety of the New Testament had been dry, except for the last book. All mythologies foretold the end of the world, and not only was this version suitably violent, but Loki played no part.

"God admitted he had been cruel, and changed His ways when He gave His only son so that humanity might be saved," Rogers said as they paused at a stoplight and waited for the "walk" signal.

"And Job? He was just the object of a bet between God and your Devil."

"This world is brief," Rogers picked up his pace as they crossed the street. Even now, a red hand was blinking. "The ailments we suffer are nothing compared to the glory that awaits. Job knew that. Money and possessions meant nothing."

"What about those he loved? God killed them to prove a point."

For all of Rogers' intelligence, his persistence in believing in something as blatantly fictional as Christianity rankled Loki.

Rogers grew pale, his mouth thinned as he replied quietly, "They waited for him at the River."

Interesting. Modern Christianity would have its believers buy into the notion that pearly gates and naked babies waited upon death. Rogers' beliefs stemmed from wholly American ones, echoed in their hymns and literature.

"Do your loved ones wait for you at this river?"

"They do." But Roger's face was troubled. Loki saw the opening.

"They will be waiting a long time." Loki pointed out, observing Roger's face out of the corner of his eyes. He remained stoic, but his eyes took on a dead quality.

It was a rotten victory.

"Maybe," Rogers agreed as they came to the church, the morning congregation streaming in through the stony steps in their cheery frocks and suits. "But they'll be there, when I am called home."

Loki said nothing as he mulled over Rogers' words. He wondered if the man was as staunch in his beliefs as he claimed, or deliberately trying to rankle Loki.

They waited until the bulk of the believers had filed in. The doors closed and the bell resounded in the early morning air. Rogers ran his fingers over the worn stone.

"This was my parents' church," he confided, his fingers lingering on a stone block on the corner of the church before he turned to head back down the street. Loki waited for him to expound on that thought; realized that he hadn't thought about Rogers' parents at all. He wondered, briefly, who they had been, and what had happened to them.

They smelled the bakery before they saw it, the warm, delicious scent of freshly baked bread wafting down the street.

"Chocolate glazed?" Rogers prompted, pushing to the counter to order enough doughnuts to sate his teammates.

"And a bear claw," Loki shuffled around the press of humans cluttered inside. Loki had never admitted it aloud, but Rogers had realized his weakness for sweets.

Rogers pressed the treat into Loki's hand as they headed home. Normally, Rogers was talkative if not a little reflective on their walk back to the Tower.

Today, he was unnaturally quiet as they traversed home, his surface thoughts melancholic and conflicted when Loki touched them. Rogers stopped abruptly, anger twisting his features. Loki was surprised: it was not an emotion he saw often enough.

"I'm not a toy, Loki. Just because we're bonded doesn't mean you have free reign to assault my mind whenever I'm not openly entertaining you."

Loki reached out again, deeper than ever before, in an effort to provoke Rogers. Beneath the surface irritation was a well of sorrow and longing such as Loki had never known. Unprepared for the assault, he pulled back rapidly, a strange lump forming in his gut.

Rogers refused to meet his gaze, and Loki realized he didn't have the words, snide _or _comforting, to deal with the things Rogers was feeling.

So he said nothing at all.


	2. I Came Around

Part II I Came Around

_I came to pay a false courtesy_

_So you couldn't get the best of me_

_But the grief hung in the air and mingled with the sweat_

_I presumed to know your inner workings, but I just guessed_

I Came Around—Murder by Death

Disclaimers: These guys aren't mine.

Much love to the bestest beta ever, Valylene

Sorry this part is so long!

Fury ran Rogers through a battery of tests, both physical and mental, to determine his continued loyalty to the team and to SHIELD.

Loki could have told them that Rogers was loyal to a fault and the tests were extraneous, but Fury hadn't asked for his opinion, and Loki knew they wouldn't have trusted his answer even if they had.

Rogers weathered the trials without complaint, was found fit for duty, and quickly returned to the position of team leader.

As it turned out, SHIELD had been fielding a lot of incursions with less skilled teams and was hurting from not having their best team active and on the field.

Almost immediately after Rogers' reinstatement as team leader, SHIELD was handing down missions. Very rarely did it require the faculties of the entire team. After several such battles, Rogers invited Loki to join in.

Loki had no interest in getting his hands dirty in battles that weren't his, but then Rogers gave him this _look_, smiled and said, "What else do you have to do?"

He considered the question. Admittedly, staying in the tower while the team battled was a tiresome affair.

Keeping in fighting form was always a good idea, Loki conceded mentally. He'd watched the Avengers on SHIELD's CCTV (and wasn't that dumb, allowing an enemy full access to view the team's tactics; they were idiots, all of them), but working with them would allow him fully realize the gaps in their defenses.

When he was finally free of the Captain and his insufferable team, he'd know where to strike first.

So Loki agreed to go along.

If he was being completely honestly, there was something in that devil-may-care look Rogers gave him that helped him along in his acquiescence. His smiles were infrequent, unlike Thor, who was always smiling, or Stark, whose insincere smirks _grated_—Loki was convinced the man knew it, too, and continued to smirk at him just to rankle him.

The rest of the team was much more shielded in the expression of their emotions.

Romanov's smiles were never to be believed except for on the rare occasion that Barton whispered something to her; then, her face would break into smile fit to split the face, and she'd throw her head back and _laugh_.

Loki never knew what secrets they shared, but for a moment, he could see the girl Romanov had been before she'd layered on secrets and a façade that matched, perhaps, even Loki's own.

It was also in these rare moments that Barton would smile, his eyes never leaving Romanov. Just for the moment all the tension would drain from his body and his eyes would soften.

Loki wondered if she knew how smitten the archer was with her. She was so clever; he couldn't imagine that she didn't.

It was Rogers, however—with smiles that formed slowly, like the sun breaking over the horizon as it heralded a new day—that Loki found the least annoying.

Age and stress would fall from his face and he'd look wholly like the twenty-something his body would always be. For a moment during those rare times, Loki felt again like the boy who had been able to make Thor laugh at his pranks.

Loki found he liked the smile: it was genuine, in a way that few other things in Loki's life were.

So when Loki walked into the planning room, he was satisfied when Rogers' face broke into a surprised smiled and motioned for him to join them.

"I've asked Loki to join us on this mission," he addressed the team before they could protest. "It's poor strategy to keep someone with as much skill as Loki benched. It will be good to have him on our side for once."

Barton looked ready to retaliate, but Romanov elbowed him in the side and his mouth snapped shut, eyes lingering on Loki, who returned the stare in evenly.

Rogers' gaze lingered on Barton. Satisfied that he would remain complicit, he returned to the sand table he'd had SHIELD establish in the war room.

Loki had been participant to a few of the fights Rogers and Stark had regarding the best way to display team tactics. Rogers maintained a sand table was the best way to address the issue, Stark argued that his 3-D technology and computers could depict the upcoming battle with much more realism than figures on a field of sand.

Rogers had finally agreed that if Stark could teach him how to use the technology, he _would_ use it. Until then, he would use sand tables.

Surprisingly, Stark had agreed.

After that, Rogers dedicated time each day to learning Stark's admittedly complex computer system.

For all of Rogers' backwardness, his ability to listen to his team and compromise was equal to that of Odin's, and Loki never thought he'd fine a human who could match his father's ability to compromise, even if he counseled peace far too often.

"Are you listening, Loki?" Rogers barked. Loki rolled his eyes. He didn't particularly care for the mission focused Rogers, who seemed incline to treat Loki as another tool in his arsenal.

"Sure," he smirked.

"Good," Rogers nodded, "We need you, so pay attention."

Loki stifled a retort, sure it would gain him no friends. He didn't care about the _who_ behind this particular attack across the river in New Jersey. He was sure it would be a battle easily won, and wondered why the team even bothered with a strategy.

Barton hung behind after Rogers had explained the operation and the team headed out. He blocked Loki's exit, brow furrowed, arms crossed.

Loki rolled his eyes. He understood Barton's animosity, but it bothered him as a tiresome fly that, despite being swatted away, continued to swarm.

"You do _anything_ to the team and I'll kill you," Barton hissed.

"You are welcome to try, but you insult me. If I wanted the team dead, they would be so before you would know it." Loki shouldered past Barton.

"Fuck you," Barton spat as he caught up and shoved past Loki, making his way over to Romanov who waited in the hall.

Her eyes met Loki's, but he couldn't discern what she was thinking.

The men on the team all thought they were Alpha males: fighters and survivors, but it was Agent Romanov with her dark eyes and impassive face that intrigued Loki the most.

It was possible, he thought, that she would be outlive everyone on the team.

Once they'd transported to the battlefield, the Avengers settled into their predetermined battle positions.

For the first time, Loki got a good view of their enemy: it was some sort mechanical monster that numbered in great scores, bright silver-rounded things with spindly legs that ended in dangerous points.

Although vastly outnumbered, the team spread out in air and on ground, making quick work of the unnamed robots.

When Loki had fought the Avengers, he'd gotten the impression that it was only through personal skill and collected luck that they'd done as well as they had.

Under Rogers, however, he understood that they'd begun to act like a team, and damn if they weren't _good. _Each of them knew their individual skillsets, and since his last efforts at demolishing their group, the Avengers had begun to coordinate their efforts.

Despite his long absence and period of judgment by SHIELD, he'd quickly settled back into the leadership role without hesitation and they responded to his commands without question.

If it was jealousy that dogged Loki, he refused to acknowledge it. If he was starting to realize that leading could be done through more than just fear, he ignored it.

Loki kept an eye on the Captain: he was always too close to the action, a center of command and control that shouted orders rarely, allowing the team do what they did best while he held his own.

Loki would need to talk to him about that—a leader should be removed from the battle so he could better observe and move his pieces; Rogers did no such thing, and Loki found himself deflecting blows that came too close to the Captain, fending off 'bots that edged into the periphery.

The enemy was fast and powerful in their attacks. The bolts of energy they shot were not unlike those that Stark's suit produced, and Loki realized that he'd underestimated the enemy. There was no way he could both fend off all the attacks on both himself and Rogers. They had obviously identified the Captain as the leader and were concentrating their firepower on them.

If Rogers was to die, it was _Loki _who would kill him, not some mechanical monstrosity.

Loki swung his staff to defend himself from a creature that had gotten too close, and saw a red beam of energy headed for Rogers' open back.

The Captain was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with another of the drones, fending off the many-limbed creature with well placed blows of the shield. Loki couldn't get to him—couldn't warn him: could only watch and know that Rogers was about to be hit by that ray.

Just before the blow landed, Stark was there, deflecting the beam and decimating its sender. Mechanical parts exploded outward, clattering to the street in sharp staccato.

His own enemy melted into a pool of metal as Loki's magic met it, and he met Stark's glowing eyes over the battlefield. Stark gave him an acknowledging nod before shooting back up into the air.

Grudgingly, he admitted he had been foolish to ignore Rogers' instruction: this force was more organized and larger than he'd anticipated and magic took a toll on his body. He would not have been able to handle this force alone, as he'd first thought.

When the enemy turned on Loki, readying to take advantage of his distraction, Stark was there to deflect the blow before it landed.

Loki met him with a scowl.

"I can protect myself."

"You _haven't_ been," Stark snapped, voice tinny behind the mask. "I've got enough going on without having to look out for you, too. Pay attention!"

It was some time later when Loki finished off one of the last remaining robots and looked across the ruined street to where Rogers was finishing up his last adversary.

Loki watched, impressed at the fluidity of Rogers' motions.

The cowl obscuring the majority of his face had been partially torn at some point revealing most of his features, blood bright as it streamed from a cut on his brow.

As he observed, Loki noted how every blow Rogers aimed at his opponent connected solidly, leaving large, fist-shaped dents in the metal that sputtered with electricity.

Rogers was a deadly force in close combat, alternating between shield and hand blows.

When he was done, the Captain shouldered his shield, face flushed and eyes bright. He looked for—and met—Loki's eyes across the battlefield and gave him a hearty grin and thumbs up.

Loki didn't return the smile, but he nodded back. Although he'd fought with Rogers, had seen him on CCTV, he realized he had ignored not only Rogers' competency in battle, but his passion.

That night, Loki stole into Stark's garage.

Getting past his security had been a matter of a short discussion with JARVIS and the promise that he would do nothing untoward and the oath that, should he break that vow, JARVIS would immediately alert the tower's residents.

He wasn't sure if the computer would let him in as JARVIS had remained silent for so long after Loki told the AI his intentions. Whatever computations JARVIS had been running seemed to come to a conclusion, and the doors slid open before him.

Loki had begun to familiarize himself with Midgard's technology. Where it remained a point of obstinacy for Rogers, Loki quickly realized that as magic was to Asgard, so, too, was the ability to manipulate computers and their code to the Midgardians.

Though he would never admit it aloud, Stark's manipulation of energy and machinery was not dissimilar to the magic of Loki's own world.

Stark was a master sorcerer even if the Misgards called it by another name, and it was these revelations that lead Loki to the assumption that technology, like magic, worked on a predefined set of structures and rules.

Once he realized learning to code was similar to parsing the arcane language of spells and sorcery books, he found he had quite the talent for it. Having such knowledge, Loki had determined, would be useful in his eventual defeat of the team.

As Loki scanned Stark's code, lines of letters and symbols that resulted in the intricate system that ran everything from the tower's energy use to the AIs, JARVIS was a reluctant guide.

Loki thought it incredibly foolhardy that Stark would have written an AI that would aid and abet the enemy.

"JARVIS," Loki tested the name on his mouth. Up to this point, he'd refused to acknowledge the thing. He could neither define it as a man or a tool, and he couldn't shake the feeling that it was not unlike a ghost. All of Asgard's ghosts were either sorrowful or vengeful creatures, bent on destroying those still living, and Loki found the so-called AI made him uncomfortable in a way few things did.

"Sir?" JARVIS replied levelly.

"I expect Stark will be displeased to find you're helping me," he mused, tapping away at the keyboard almost idly.

The AI was clever enough to hear the unasked question in Loki's statement, and it agreed dryly.

"Indeed, sir. However, I have seen your interactions with Mr. Rogers."

"Have you?" Loki inquired, making a few adjustments with several quick keystrokes. Just like the dead, JARVIS' only entertainment was watching, and just like the dead, Loki knew he had to be respectful.

"Yes, sir. Despite your less than savory behavior in the past, you have been quite honorable since your return."

"And?" Loki prompted. Work finished, he leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. Why hadn't Stark engineered a projection for his creation? The man certain had the skills and technology for it, why did he favor a disembodied voice over form?

"And you have started putting back the pieces that were missing from Mr. Rogers. I have also been scanning your work. You have improved the tower's defenses."

Loki considered the lines of code. Stark was always manually adjusting things in his system. These were stupid errors, ones that shouldn't have been made by one such as Stark. Loki was reluctant to give praise to another, but for ever how much Stark irritated him, Loki had to admit that his ability to manipulate his world was impressive. He wondered why the man was slipping.

"Sir," JARVIS intoned. "Mr. Stark arrives."

The whirring of the door was all the warning he had before Stark barged in all bluster and fuss.

"What are you doing here? This is off limits!" he fumed, jabbing a finger at Loki.

"I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're here on Steve's insistence and good will! If I find out that you screwed something up, I'll—"

"I fixed a gap in your security," Loki swiveled around in the chair to regard Stark evenly.

"There's no gap! What gap? You did what?" Stark's ire grew as a healthy dose of confusion convoluted the mix and he stormed over to the demigod, leaning over the computers and reading the code.

"Huh," he said.

"Right here," Loki pointed to a code he'd frozen on the screen. "There's a glitch—"

"I see it," Stark replied shortly, eyes scanning the code Loki had written. He frowned tightly, and Loki didn't have to be an empath to know he was embarrassed.

The dark circles under the inventor's eyes and the parade of empty scotch bottles lined across tables and desks said what Stark didn't have to. Just as Loki had been left pondering "what ifs", the monsters in the dark dogged Stark, and the line of alcohol bottles stood testament to his self-medicated attempts at finding sleep.

"It's shoddy work," Loki spun back and forth in his chair laconically, piercing Stark with green eyes. Stark ran a hand through mussed hair, evidence of hard nights and intermittent showers.

"How the hell did you get in here?" Stark demanded instead of owning to his weaknesses.

Loki regarded him with a raised eyebrow.

"You insult me."

Tony frowned in irritation.

"What the hell do you know about computers?"

Loki stood with a casual shrug.

"I'll be taking my leave," he said as he strode out, brushing past Tony.

Loki could hear Stark arguing with JARVIS as he made his way down the hallway, and he grinned to himself when Stark's voice rose in ire.

As he walked the hall, he wondered about JARVIS' comment, and the pieces missing from Steve Rogers' soul.

0o0o0o0o0o0

Several days later, Rogers came over the tower's intercom to inform them of a new mission.

SHIELD was already scrambling jets, and by the time the Avengers were on the streets of Brooklyn, they were already empty of civilians. Occasionally, Loki caught the glimpse of pale faces and wide eyes peering out behind curtained windows.

This time, it was an unnamed ground based alien species. They'd already deployed a heavily weaponized platoon of insect-like creatures with a keratinized armor so thick and so dense it made simple melee impossible.

SHIELD's assessment of the force was that they were reconnaissance only, testing the defenses of earth.

Stark groused over the comm, "What is this, some sort of Warp Drive thing? Once they caught our signature, we're open game to any alien race that comes across us?"

Loki understood the reference, but Rogers' befuddled, "What?" made Loki make a note to sit his hapless bonded down and watch Star Trek. It was embarrassing how little he knew about the last seventy years of pop culture.

"_Star Trek_—just... never mind," came Stark's aggrieved response.

Loki smirked to himself as he followed the team onto the streets, taking a somewhat removed position from the battle.

Compared to the last, this battle seemed easier, until an arriving ship blasted the torn streets with a beam of energy, scattering Avengers and aliens alike. In the confusion, a fresh company of troops deployed to the ground, doubling their enemies presence.

Despite their greater numbers, the species wasn't as adept as spotting Loki's illusions as the mechanical enemy had been, so he made an army of himself to keep them occupied while the Avengers picked them off.

Due to the amount of energy required to keep such an illusion active, Loki noticed almost too late that an alien had closed in on him. He cursed himself, knowing that if he stopped concentrating, his army would disappear and the species would quickly realize they were fighting only ghosts and refocus their efforts on the Avengers—and, more importantly, on Rogers.

Stark was there before Loki could weigh his choices. He landed in a flash of red and gold, blocking the energy blast moments before it would have hit Loki. He was off again before Loki could say anything, and it was a simple matter of taking out the stragglers.

That evening, when Stark found Loki in his garage, it was resigned cautiousness twined with annoyance that flashed across his face instead of the naked rage that had been there before.

"I thought I blocked you out," he said as he keyed the door open.

"You tried," Loki agreed.

Stark frowned, pausing to pour himself a glass from one of the mostly empty bottles he had strewn about before he stalked forward.

"Just what do you think you're doing?"

Loki watched Stark take a healthy swig from his glass and quickly replaced the amber liquid. He wondered whom Stark was trying to fool by keeping the glass full.

"For a genius, you're sloppy," he stated.

"I don't care what Steve or Thor says, I'm going to strangle you by your tiny neck," Stark threatened, his drink sloshing over the rim of the glass as he pantomimed choking Loki.

Loki suspected that this was not Stark's first drink of the evening, and he wondered if Rogers knew of his mechanical genius's drinking problem. So far, Stark had managed to keep it together on the battlefield, but Loki knew that the man could only burn the candle on both ends for so long before he burned out.

Somehow, he didn't think this fact had evaded Rogers' attention. Either way, it was none of his business.

"Sir," JARVIS interrupted mildly, "Loki has keyed us into SHIELD's defense system. Whenever there's a breach to Earth's atmosphere, we will be informed as soon as they are. It should reduce the lag in Avenger response time."

Tony paused, the vehemence draining from his body as he leaned against a garish yellow car with arms crossed. He frowned.

"What are you playing at, Loki? We both know you're no friend of mine."

"What I do is my business." Loki stood.

"It becomes mine when you continually breach my security systems," Stark argued, taking a more leisurely sip from his glass. Loki could see the gears grinding in his head, pleased that he was managing to flummox Stark as much as Stark irritated him.

"I'm sure JARVIS would let you know if I was up to no good," Loki returned with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.

"When did you become so good at computers, anyway?" Curiosity overrode Stark's frustration, and his dour expression cleared slightly.

Loki realized it was the expression Stark always wore when he was trying to decipher some new puzzle.

"Cap has been here longer than you and can't figure out modern technology for shit. He's like an old man. If we still had CD drives, I swear he'd be using the damn thing for a cup holder."

Loki regarded him coolly before shrugging.

"The fundamentals of your technology are not so different than that of my magic. Learn the rules, and the rest opens up."

"Huh," Stark said slowly. "But that doesn't answer my question: why are you upgrading my systems?"

"My answer remains the same," Loki said, gliding past him.

He paused at the door, turning his head slightly to address Tony.

"Perhaps your captain remains obstinate because accepting your future means letting another part of his past go."

Loki counted it a victory that he'd apparently stumped Stark, his grating voice absent as Loki ghosted down the hallway and back upstairs.

As he rode the elevator back up, he thought, perhaps, there was more to Stark than spiteful smirks and witty one-liners. Twice now, the man had protected him with no expectation of recompense.

The thought troubled Loki.

0o0o0o0o0o0o

When they weren't at battle or devising war strategies, Rogers had taken to converting a portion of Stark's roof top terrace into a garden.

While the owner of the Tower was ensconced in his garage or away in his Malibu home, the leader of the Avengers dutifully built a raised garden that he filled with rich, black dirt ordered in bulk from some online company with JARVIS's aid.

Seedlings started in black plastic trays in the south-facing window of the tower's conference room had brought attention to Rogers' endeavors long before he began work on the roof. During meetings with Fury, the Avengers chanced glances at the growing plants. They never mentioned them, and Rogers never offered an explanation.

Loki was amused however, by the shared looks between the Avengers with every new board of wood brought up the stairs.

When Rogers felt he'd readied his garden enough for plants, he invited Loki to a trip to the Farmer's Market at Union Square.

Loki agreed, because as he told Rogers, he could only be expected to be social with the Avengers for so long, but really, it was because he found he'd grown fond of his incursions with the Captain.

"Oh, tomatoes," Rogers enthused as he handed over cash for a tiny collection of six weak-looking plants. They'd wilted under the New York sun, and Loki had a hard time imagining that a boy born of the city and frozen in seventy years of ice could make anything of the dying plants.

"They look dead."

"They could use a little help, sure, but imagine how nice it'll be when they produce fruit." Rogers moved down the tent, pulling plants with labels that declared their various cultivars.

Loki had no response to that, and so remained silent.

Rogers studied the tags as if it meant something to him before adding them to a small cardboard container the farmer had given him. Before long, he'd filled it up and grabbed another. Looking at Loki with a smile and beseeching eyes, he held out the container of vegetables, and begged, "Hold this?"

"I'm not your servant," Loki returned without much heat, though he took the proffered box all the same.

"Of course not, but look at these flowers! I was thinking we could have a flower garden! Maybe we could get butterflies and bees. JARVIS says they're going extinct; would you ever have thought that?" Rogers was dangerously close to rambling, his eyes scanned the tag on a bright purple flower before placing it in his new box.

"What do you know about gardening?" Loki asked quickly before Rogers could discuss the extinction of bees in length. "You've always lived in the city."

Rogers' hand paused over the next flower, and he looked at Loki. Something flashed in his eyes before he forced a smile—and this one, being disingenuous, irritated Loki in a way he couldn't put words to.

"I've got some books from the library. We'll learn how to do it."

As they walked back to the tower, arms full of potential, Rogers said, "Natasha saw my back."

"Oh?" Loki replied, feigning disinterest.

For a man such as Rogers who displayed his emotions so openly, Loki was surprised by how much he kept from his team. He hadn't spoken of their journey, either to Loki or to the team, since the abridged version he'd given upon their arrival back in Midgard.

"Yeah," Rogers said. He didn't expand further, and Loki wondered why he'd brought it up at all.

Stark found them on the rooftop later that afternoon, Rogers' arms full of sprouts and seedlings. Loki stood beside him, the auxiliary mule. Stark pulled the glasses up on his head, his face one of incredulity.

"What the hell is this?" the billionaire asked loudly, eyeing the potted plants and their newest additions warily.

"It's a garden," Rogers replied, gathering the container in Loki's arms and setting it down on the terrace.

"A garden? Like that fad? What do they call them? Green roofs?"

"A green roof?" Rogers frowned in the way he always did when a reference was made he didn't understand. Loki was learning that there were many such instances.

"Well, what are you doing, then?" Stark surveyed the plants and then looked up, first at Loki, a shared feeling of "what the hell is he doing now?" passing between them before Stark looked back at Rogers.

"I'm planting a garden. There's all this open space and nobody ever uses it, so why not? JARVIS says it's popular right now. We did it back in the '40s—Victory Gardens. So, maybe it's not a new fad after all."

"A garden?" Stark repeated, nose wrinkled as he did so. "Like, physical labor?" He leaned in, plucking a tag from the meager soil with a picture of heirloom tomatoes and a brief description of their care.

"You spend half your time in garage, so don't start on me, Tony." Steve laid the plants down and organized them in future rows. Grabbing a hoe he'd ordered online with JARVIS's help, he began making orderly rows.

JARVIS had also ordered him cages for the tomatoes, which he had organized in a pile at the end of the bed.

"That's manly stuff," Stark stuck the tag back into the earth as he eyed the mess Rogers had made of his roof top terrace. Dirt and fertilizer was strewn across the cement from bags that lay split open. Tomato cages and tools lay in a somewhat ordered fashion, but Stark eyed them skeptically.

"Whatever," Rogers replied without venom as he jiggled the metal cages apart. Loki could see him positively preening from his use of a "modern" word.

"Whatever, indeed." Stark frowned. "What are you planting? Not eggplant, I hope. I can't stand the stuff. And why is it, anyway, that whenever I leave for anywhere, I come back to find you've done stuff to my house?"

"It's good for you," Rogers said, though, if he was answering Stark's first or second question, Loki was unsure. The frown on Stark's face indicated he didn't know, either.

Rogers ignored them both as he kneeled in the black dirt, slipping the plants from their containers and carefully unknotting white roots as he placed them in their future homes.

"No eggplant," Stark repeated, sliding his sunglasses back down over his eyes.

"No eggplant," Rogers agreed with tried patience.

Stark stayed a moment longer before he huffed, "This is supposed to be my relaxing place. I don't want to come up here in a month and find a forest of dead things."

Rogers looked affronted as he returned, "I won't abandon this."

Loki saw realization flash across Stark's face, and he looked at Loki once again before declaring, "This is boring," and heading back inside.

Loki stayed and watched as Rogers, methodical and deliberate in his work, turned the rooftop earth, planting seedlings in the turned soil.

The plants sat bright and green against black earth and cement. They looked small and fragile to Loki's eyes: it would have been easy to step on them and destroy all of Rogers' work.

The man himself was silent a long time in his work before he looked aside and said, "The team is trying their best to accept you, you know."

"You could fool me."

"They take a little while to get used to somebody new, but none of us are saints, so I think you'll find they'll give you a little leeway, if you allowed it."

"It's not me," Loki protested, frowning at the accusation. He prided himself on being a master actor, in obfuscating his true motives until he'd set things to his liking.

"Okay," Rogers agreed.

They continued in silence as Loki mulled over Rogers' words.

It made him unhappy that he was failing in his mission. Debating whether or not to continue the conversation, Loki finally reluctantly ASKED, "If we're bound, it is in my best interest that your team accept me."

He allowed the unasked question to hang in the air. He would not ask for advice, but if Rogers were to give it, that would not be unwelcome.

Rogers continued working the earth.

"Sometimes, when we talk to you, you get this expression, like you just ate something sour."

"I do not," Loki scowled. He wanted to sit, felt awkward looming over Rogers, but there was no chair, and he wasn't going to sit on the _ground_ like some commoner.

"Maybe you don't notice," Rogers placated as he cupped his hands carefully around a tiny tomato, burrowing it into the earth before he ensconced it in a cage.

Loki couldn't imagine that the pitiful thing would ever grow large enough to need its provided support.

"But if you always look like you'd rather be eating glass than talking to them, you won't win any friends."

"Did you realize that your teammates often say stupid things?" Loki asked, thinking he'd have to tell JARVIS to order a lawn chair and put in on Rogers' account.

Beside his idiot brother and Rogers, the AI was the only entity in the Tower that deigned him worthy to speak to beyond monosyllabic answers.

Surprisingly, Stark had actually begun to acknowledge him, though getting him to respond with more than insults was a slow and arduous process. Loki was sure he would have been the last of the team to win over—after Barton, but Loki was sure he was a lost cause.

"I don't think they do," Rogers argued amiably. "Well, Tony, maybe," Rogers conceded after a moment's thought before he moved onto the next row.

The pasted paper on the stick declared these weak things to be snap peas. Loki wondered how they could ever grow to be anything more than the struggling things they were.

But then, it had been a plant that bound him to Rogers in the first place, and maybe he shouldn't be so condescending of them.

"They do," Loki insisted, watching Rogers work, feeling his lips curl up in judgment. Humanity didn't have a lot going for them, but Rogers and his team were the best they had to offer, and here he was, digging in the dirt like some peasant.

"This is what the leader of the best team your world has to offer does in his free time?" Loki voiced his thoughts.

Rogers looked up, settling back on his haunches to study Loki. He scratched his nose, leaving a smudge of dirt across his face. "If you can't understand the basic needs of the smallest of life, how can you appreciate anything more? Pass me the trowel, please?"

"This is work for servants," Loki said as he looked at Rogers' tools, and realized he didn't know the names of any of them.

"It's that short one, with the broad blade," Rogers motioned.

Loki leaned down and passed the indicated tool to the Captain.

"Thanks," Rogers returned to his work.

Loki quickly grew bored watching him, became acutely aware of the sweat dripping down his collar and trickling down his back.

There was nowhere to sit, but he'd had enough of his computer and of the stares of condemnation from the Avengers that he didn't feel like going back inside.

He knelt down instead. "Tell me what to do."

Rogers looked up, a smile pulling on his face, although he had the decency to try and hide it.

"Can you cut those okra free from their packaging and free the roots?"

Loki grabbed the plant, easily slipping the vegetable from its plastic enclosure. He studied the root ball before carefully loosening tender roots so they dangled; ready to accept a new home.

As he helped settle the plant into its new home, he found the action curiously satisfying, and in the passing months, he took more than a cursory interest in the health of the plants he'd helped root.

0o0o0o0o0o

As Rogers' garden grew with the summer, so did the amount of time that various Avengers spent on the terrace.

Loki sought the place in refuge; a quietness totally different from anywhere else in the tower and oddly comforting in its own way. He found that where Rogers' skill in gardening lacked, he found he could supplement with small spells of encouragement.

As he'd grown in skill and power, he'd mostly set aside the magic his mother had taught him; the most cursory spells of healing and life. Now, he found they were most applicable and he reached for them from the dregs of his memory.

On one summer's afternoon as Loki bent over a plant and offered it words of encouragement, he was vaguely aware of the presence of another.

"What are you doing?" Banner's forced calm voice disrupted Loki's concentration, and he glared up at the doctor.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" He shot back.

"It looks like you're killing—" Banner trailed off before starting again. "Are you tending Cap's plants?"

"He is not a farmer." Spell completed, Loki straightened he settled his gaze on Banner, daring him to confront him.

Banner rarely went on missions with the team, instead holing up in his laboratory with his experiments and compilations of data.

When he was the green monster—the Hulk, the team called him, while Banner himself often referred to his alternate soul split as "The Other Guy"—he was the team's most powerful asset, however, he was also their least controllable.

As Loki had come to realize the extent to what Banner battled with on a daily base, he'd come to have a reluctant growing respect for the human.

"Why?" Banner asked, waving at the plants.

Loki frowned.

"Are all humans this inquisitive? Must I feel like I am always participant to an interrogation?"

Banner remained unflappable.

"Last year, you wanted to kill us, and now you're urging Steve's plants to live. We're told you've change your M.O., and that you're one of the good guys now."

Loki's respect for the man didn't extend to having to explain himself.

"Is it so hard to imagine? You presume to know me, but we have never spoken. Would you be so quick to condemn me? You, who cannot even control half his soul?"

Loki expected Banner's face to screw up in anger or irritation. Instead, he looked thoughtful, and Loki realized he didn't want to hear his response, didn't want to engage in a philosophical argument with the man.

He was afraid of what he might learn about Banner, about himself.

Although true transportation of the self was exhausting and a spell Loki only used when threatened, to the undiscerning eye, a simple cloaking spell served the same purpose. With a gesture and a word, Banner's eyes were skipping over Loki as if he wasn't there at all.

If Banner was surprised that Loki had apparently disappeared before him, he didn't show it. Frowning, the scientist shoved his hands into his pockets as he looked at where Loki had just been.

"That was unfair," Banner said to what he thought was the empty air. "We are not so different, you and I."

0o0o0o0o0o

JARVIS and Rogers ordered new windows for his room in Stark's tower.

The man still hadn't gotten his sign fixed, and it still glowed _A _and Barton had started calling it the Avengers tower, and Loki wondered if Stark didn't keep it broken on purpose.

When they arrived, the team watched as Rogers carried the windows up the stairs and disappeared into his room.

Loki caught the look Romanov and Barton shared: the woman shrugged her shoulders and looked back to her book. Barton idly flipped channels on Stark's obnoxiously huge TV and ignored the rest of the team.

Loki waited long enough so Rogers wouldn't think Loki was interested in his activities before traversing the spacious halls to idle by Rogers' room.

The door was wide open, and Loki could feel the humidity rolling out into the hall.

The Captain was stripped down to cargo pants and a soaked undershirt, his room open to the elements. The air was hot and heavy from the late summer, and Rogers' skin was covered in a light sheen of sweat. He'd covered his furniture in plastic, protecting them from the elements and the mess he was making.

"What are you doing?" Loki tried not to sneer as he leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. The drawings on Rogers' walls wilted under the unwelcomed humidity.

With the windows gone, Loki could hear the distant sounds of impatient cars far below, and news helicopters above getting an eye on traffic.

"At some point in the last seventy years, they've stopped making windows that open. Air conditioning is great, I'll give you that, but sometimes, you just want to feel the air on your face. Best to work on it now, when the weather is manageable," Rogers explained, unwrapping the last of the new windows.

In opposition to the hermetically sealed ones that adorned the rest of the rooms, these ones had screens and would allow Rogers to open his room to the open air.

"I'd hardly call this 'manageable,'" Loki rejoined acerbically.

Asgard's days were always fine and clear, and Loki had never known air could be so oppressive until he'd come to Midgard.

The captain grinned at him before he turned to study the gaping frames. His face scrunched in thought, his hands on his hips.

Rogers' face was always so expressive when he thought no one was looking.

"I don't know how to do this," he finally admitted.

"You are not a carpenter," Loki pointed out as he breeched the entrance and sat on Rogers' plastic-covered bed. "Although, wasn't your idol?"

"He's not an idol," Rogers scowled. "And no, I'm not really a carpenter. JARVIS, we can do this, can't we?"

"Indeed, Sir," JARVIS agreed. "You had better: you have already taken the window out."

If it wasn't amusement in JARVIS' voice, it was close enough, and Loki was surprised to find both that he recognized it, and that Stark had taken the time to program a sense of humor into his peppy AI.

"Can you pull up the blueprints of the building and show me some tutorials?"

"Yes, sir."

Rogers sat beside Loki on his plastic-covered bed they studied the blueprints displayed onto his wall and watched several YouTube videos on the tablet Rogers had bought himself.

Loki thought it showed an amazing out of trust that he was allowed to look at the blueprints. He silently noted weaknesses in the structure.

To Stark's credit, there weren't many.

It turned out it wasn't a one-man project, no matter that one man's strength, and Rogers enlisted Loki for his help.

Together, they fitted the new window frames into place, closing out the outside world in increments. When they were done, Rogers wheeled his new windows open, allowing the wet air back in.

Loki had never engaged in such menial behavior in his life, but as he took a proffered iced tea and sat in the newly uncovered chair, he found that it was oddly rewarding.

0o0o0o0o

Once Rogers found out something called Monopoly was still around, he called a game night.

The Avengers gathered in the den. Rogers quickly explained the rules to the Aesir as Stark warmed up a few bags of popcorn.

Barton entered the room grudgingly, his eyes narrowing when he sighted Loki.

"I'm the cannon," he declared as he settled into a chair at the game table. The colorful board was laid out, and Rogers dutifully placed the named piece onto the "start" location.

"Drink, anyone?" Stark called from behind the bar. He was eyeing his collection of alcohol before he poured a glass of gin for himself.

"Is that rhetorical?" Romanov asked, eyebrows raised as she smirked. "Just bring the bottle over, and count us all in."

"You people are going to drink me out of house and home," Stark groused, but he complied. "Bruce, a hand?"

Banner aided in bringing enough glasses over for the team, although, like always, he abstained.

Rogers waved his own off, but conceded when Thor offered some Asgard mead. Rogers flashed his eyes to Loki, and he raised his glass in cheer.

"Can't hurt, right?" He grinned.

"Indeed," Loki replied, raising his own glass.

"Oh, you can't have a cheers without the rest of us!" Stark clinked his glass into Loki's before taking a healthy gulp. He shuddered as he set the glass down with a clunk. "Now that's some good stuff."

Loki entered the game with a tenuous grasp of the rules, but with the rate at which the rest of the team was rapidly becoming inebriated, he decided it didn't really matter.

After several rounds, Thor had managed to land on all the Railroads and was raking in the cash with every subsequent landing. He grinned broadly with a smile Loki knew well: it was the one Thor wore whenever he thought he was besting an enemy.

Loki fought the urge to roll his eyes. His brother had taken to the game surprisingly fast, but it was a children's game, and Thor had never really advanced past childhood.

Romanov had two of the greens, whose names Loki couldn't be bothered to remember. She tried to make a bargain with Banner, who had North Carolina Avenue. She had a red he wanted, and they entered negotiations.

Several rounds later, Stark had claimed both Park Place and Boardwalk.

"It's only fitting," He told them with a grin, buying houses to put on the locations. "You guys land on this, and you're sunk. Hey, I know what. Loser pays for the booze."

But Rogers had all of the oranges and maroons and that side of the board was his. As it turned out, players had a greater propensity to land on those properties than Stark's.

Loki stole a look at Rogers. For the first time he could remember, the man seemed genuinely happy: he was relaxed, a look of complacency on his face. He didn't seem interested in winning the game (even though he was, if the collected pile of property and money was any indication, Loki realized in annoyance).

He assayed the team. They'd become too engaged in the game to worry about agonizing Loki, too inebriated to worry that their one-time enemy was now seated beside them.

Loki bought one of the reds that Barton wanted. Barton scowled fiercely.

"You know I have two of those, that's poor sportsmanship. That should be mine."

"But it's not," Loki argued, realizing Thor's mead had made him heady. While alcohol had always made Thor boisterous—as he was currently—it'd always had the opposite effect on Loki. The ability to become less concerned about his written future allowed him to relax.

"I'm not trading with you," Loki preempted the ranger with a laconic smile. _You're an asshole_, he was ready to say, but the easy smile on Rogers face stayed him.

"I'll give you Oriental and you'll have all of the light blues," Barton tried in his best diplomatic tone. Loki noticed the alcohol had loosened him up, too. He needed to be cautious, unsure of the effect it would have on the ranger. Barton had been priming for a fight ever since Loki and Rogers had returned, and alcohol might lower his inhibitions enough to try exactly that.

Killing Barton would definitely ruin Rogers' buzz.

"Those aren't worth anything," Loki frowned, glaring at his own cards blearily. "I won't stand for it."

Barton scowled at him. "So take the Electric." He hiccupped. "Also. Also take the Electric."

"Only if you throw in Waterworks," Loki hedged. Barton frowned.

"Three cards for one? I don't think so. " Barton shot back, obviously agitated. "Why are you so selfish?" But he wasn't asking about the game, and both of them knew it.

"Why are you so presumptuous?" The words were out of Loki's mouth before he realized it, and he mentally cursed Thor's mead.

Wariness replaced Rogers' look of complacency, his shoulders tensing as he eyed the bellicose pair.

Barton threw the cards he'd been negotiating onto the table as he stood up, fists balled. "I'm tired of your shit, Loki! You may have the rest of the team bought into your game, but I'm not fooled!"

And Barton was almost right; had been, in the beginning, and maybe still was in some respects, excepting Rogers, and Thor of course, who stayed by his side unwaveringly.

Maybe, not even with Stark, who'd actually started having halfway decent conversations with Loki, or Banner, who he'd come to an understanding with, or even Romanov, who, despite all blasé appearances, was as ready to protect the team from harm as Rogers was.

It was she who now pulled on Barton's arm, her eyes dark.

"Sit _down_," she hissed. "You don't want to do this."

Barton ignored her, jabbing a finger at Rogers.

"You _let_ him onto the team! He _possessed_ me and I _killed_ people. _Good_ people! You don't know what it's like! I could see everything do _nothing_ to stop it. I see their deaths every fucking day, Steve!"

Loki knew without looking that Rogers' eyes no longer held self-satisfied look in them, and that they now reflected something much deeper.

Despair leaked across their bond, and despite Loki's best efforts to block it, it swelled over his walls and seeped in, like water past sandbags in rising storm waters.

Loki refused to meet Rogers' eyes, refused to see the sorrow there, refused to feel responsible for Barton's grievances.

The rest of the team remained still, watching the events unfold. Loki saw Stark's eyes meet Banner's. Thor's own face was troubled, a muscle jumping in his jaw, the tension in his muscles betraying in forced air of calm.

"C'mon, let's get a move on." Stark tried impatiently. "Say, we should make this a drinking game."

"You make everything a drinking game," Banner complained, a half-drunk bottle of beer sweating on its coaster.

"That's because it makes everything better," Stark attempted lightly, but his eyes were narrowed, watching Barton carefully.

"No!" Barton ripped away from Romanov's grasp. "You're _vile_, Loki. You're poisoning this team, and I'll kill you for it. "

Loki felt his sense of self-protectiveness prickle, and he stood up, forcing himself to remain steady on his feet as he projected intimidation.

"You can try," he promised. "But it _will_ be the last thing you ever try."

That was all the provocation Barton needed: he launched.

The team was up instantly, Romanov and Stark pulling on Barton as he attacked Loki.

Magic, Loki found, was much harder when inebriated and he cursed himself for letting his guard down as he found himself pinned between the couch and Barton's rage-fueled attacks. He couldn't concentrate, had left his staff in his room, and he was a fool for allowing himself to think he was safe in the tower.

So he hit back.

There were very few times in his life that Loki had actually engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and while he was nowhere near as skilled as Thor or any of his warrior kin, he could hold his own. Despite the awkward angle he was in, wedged as he was, he managed to get a quick jab in through Barton's wild attack.

With a _crack_, there was an explosion of blood from Barton's nose.

And then Barton was off him, Rogers having angled himself between them. Taking advantage of the situation, Stark hauled Barton off and Romanov threw him into an arm lock.

Loki could feel his eye swelling from a blow he'd failed to deflect. Barton had stopped struggling, sinking into Romanov's arms as sobs wracked him. Between wet gasps for air, Barton recanted the awful expressions of the faces of the men he'd betrayed shortly before killing them.

Rogers helped Loki back onto the chair, concerned eyes assessing his bloody lip and swollen eye.

"You okay?"

"I'm fine," Loki hissed, shrugging away from Rogers.

Rogers shrugged and turned to Barton.

"Let's get you to bed," he offered. "Come on," he urged, wrapping a loose arm around his shoulder. Although he could carry the burden alone, he and Romanov carried Barton down the hall, his head sunk to his chest as his sobs quieted.

"Brother," Thor reached for Loki's swollen eye, "you have been hurt."

"Leave me alone," Loki swatted him away. Thor reluctantly complied, instead settling down on the armrest of Loki's chair, a silent, staunch guardian.

Banner and Stark returned to the game board, overturned from the action. Banner began collecting pieces and pressing crumpled paper money flat against the table.

Stark folded up the board, putting it back into its box.

"I've never known a game of Monopoly to end well," he reflected.

"Can it, Stark," Banner said shortly as he slid the top home with the sound of rubbing cardboard before returning it to the empty shelf Rogers had declared the "game shelf." Loki suspected it might remain the only occupant if tonight was any indication at how well the team played games together.

Loki remained brooding on the chair long after the rest had packed up. Stark had remained at the door for a moment as if he wanted to say something, he had no words of witty wisdom and so he wordlessly flipped the lights off, casting Loki in the pale light of the reflected city lights.

It was here that Rogers found him not much later. Not bothering with the lights, he approached Loki carefully, as one would an injured animal. Rogers' shoulders were slumped, his eyes dark. Loki watched him through hooded eyes, feigning sleep as he wondered at Rogers' motivations.

He collapsed onto the couch wordlessly, pulling his feet up and pushing his head into one of the plush pillows. Loki was ready to hate him for whatever words he had prepared, whatever empty condolences would pour from his lips. Loki had been wrong to ever trust in any of them.

He should've killed Rogers when he had the chance.

Rogers remained silent. Loki reached out across their bond and found the man closed off, ribbons of inner turmoil leaking out behind walls shuttered around his thoughts and feelings. Since his last incursion, Rogers had built up mental defenses, and Loki found himself oddly discomforted by the realization.

Instead, Loki listened to Roger's breaths, slow and regular. He chanced a glance over.

Rogers' eyes were half-lidded and unfocused, his face cast in the sickly light of Stark's electronics, pale greens and blues that made him look ghoulish.

Loki reflected on the burden put on this man. Rogers shouldered his responsibility silently, but he was the tie that bound the team together. He was so insistent on keeping the peace between them, an admittedly difficult task from what Loki had seen of the clashing personalities of the Avengers.

Loki only added to his difficulties, but for all the fights he caused, all the strife that churned amongst the team caused by his mere presence, Rogers continued to defend him.

The center could not hold: Rogers would break one day. The thought did not bring the enjoyment it once might have.

"We all do things in war that none of us are proud of, but the act remains even when the war is over and we are left to live with that for all the days of our life," Rogers said into the darkness, startling Loki from his thoughts. He was sure the man had fallen asleep.

Loki waited for him to say something else, but he didn't. Before long, Rogers' breaths fell into a steady rhythm. Much later, after the moon had set and still Loki brooded, Rogers whimpered in his sleep, crying out for men that had were long dead.

Loki felt something shift in him as he recognized the helplessness in Roger's cries. It was easy to forget that Rogers, the paragon of American virtue and morality, had suffered in his own war.

He wondered what, exactly, Rogers had done that he regretted. He'd never thought to ask: hadn't considered it worthy of his time or consideration.

Loki had never thought to feel guilty for his own actions: had always felt that regret was best left to the weak.

But then, he'd never really had to live with his decisions, either. Since living on Midgard he had been forced to see the consequences of his decisions.

Every day, he walked the wrecked streets and passed the walls with thousands of smiling faces marking the dead and the missing. Barton was still haunted by his actions, caught in a body he'd always trusted and that had betrayed him.

Loki was uncomfortable with the thought, and when he drifted to sleep, his dreams troubled him.

When he awoke the next morning, he was back in his room. He stared up at the ceiling. He knew who had taken him here, irritated that Rogers' continually assumed responsibility for him.

His eye ached, his tongue darting out over his swollen lip to assess the damage. He climbed from the bed, his head pounding with his heart, the light pouring in through the open window much too bright.

Rogers was in the kitchen, the clean, fresh smell of coffee greeting Loki even before the sound of sizzling bacon.

Barton and Romanov were already at the table, both nursing a cup of coffee. Barton wouldn't meet his eyes, silently pushing a coffee cup in his direction.

Loki took it wordlessly.

"That's quite a shiner," Romanov observed with a quirk of the lips.

Loki touched his eye. He was surprised to find the animosity he harbored wasn't as staunch as he'd hoped.

His skin was tender to the touch, the lid mostly swollen shut. He knew without looking that the skin was purple and black and likely hideous against his pale skin.

"Some grease should help," Rogers offered as he plated a helping of hash browns, eggs, and bacon.

Loki expected his stomach to turn, but it didn't.

0o0o0o0o0o0o

Loki and Barton kept their distance, although their brief interactions had slowly become more cordial than anything prior to their fight. Loki briefly considered asking Rogers about it before deciding that Romanov was the more obvious choice.

JARVIS informed him that she wasn't training and that she was, instead, in one of Stark's unused workshops. The AI guided him, dropping Loki off at a room at the end of a long hallway of workshops near one of the bottom floors.

The door was open.

Here, the city was so much closer and the sounds of the road were audible even through the closed windows. Loki stood in the door, watching Romanov. She was bent over a desk, a fine carving knife in one hand, a wooden block in the other and curls of wood shavings all about her.

She looked up at Loki's approach.

"Come in," she offered with a tight nod of the head, loose curls bouncing around her face.

Loki accepted the invitation and settled into the only completed available room in the chair—an intricately carved rocking chair.

Delicate lines were worked into the arms and backing. Trying the curved bars that connect the legs, Loki experimentally rocked back and forth. The rhythm was soothing, and the wood had been carved so expertly that it was a comfortable sit.

He scanned the room.

The architecture was typical Stark, but everything else was, apparently, all Romanov.

The spy sat at simple workbench, her tools laid out in neat lines. The walls were full of shelves—each as beautiful as they were functional—and various carvings of animals lined them. Loki found they were surprisingly fluid in their captured motions of flight or running.

Unfinished furniture lay about in various states of completion, and from hard edges and sharp corners, Loki could see the forms of gentle curves emerge. Loki didn't have to know the details about woodworking to appreciate the skill Romanov possessed. He knew beauty when he saw it.

Loki's eyes fell onto her desk and he realized with a start that she was carving the team. Banner as the Hulk was evidenced from his mass, and Loki could make out the sharp edges of Stark's Ironman. Glancing up, he saw Barton on a shelf above, bow drawn.

"Am I interrupting you?" Loki asked as annoyance prickled him. He wasn't used to being ignored, not by the Aesir and certainly not by humans.

Romanov looked up, eyes sharp and assessing.

"We do things besides fight and train," she replied, her tone almost chiding. "We are human, Loki."

"You are frustrating," Loki retorted.

Talking with Romanov was like navigating unknown shoals, and he wondered why he thought this had been a good idea.

"Our fates aren't written in books," Romanov mused as she returned to carving. Loki couldn't see who she was forming from the block of wood, her hands blocking the features. "So we can be whoever we want to be. I imagine that would be frustrating to someone like you."

"'Someone like me?'" Loki echoed back. "What do you know about someone like me?"

"I know," Romanov put the carving down and twisted around in her chair to level Loki with her eerily perceptive gaze, "that you're trapped in the words of moldy books written thousands of years ago, and that you hate it."

The short reply Loki had prepared died on his tongue, and he frowned at her.

"But," she continued, crossing her legs to set her chin in her palm, "you didn't come here to talk about your cage."

"Why did I come here, then?" Loki crossed his arms. From everything he'd read, there was nothing supernatural about Romanov: no serum in her veins, no dazzling intelligence that allowed her to build suits powered on energy sources embedded in a chest that defied physics.

"You're here because you want to talk about Clint," she smiled, running a hand through her hair.

Loki stopped rocking convinced the records on her were wrong. She was telepathic; she had to be.

"I'm not telepathic, I'm just good at reading people." Romanov leaned back, watching Loki carefully. "You want to know why Clint's not being churlish towards you."

"Nothing has changed between us," Loki protested.

He had met many humans in his life, but besides Rogers, none had the ability to befuddle him the way Romanov did.

"It's nothing special. It's just a male thing. He was mad, and he had to get it off his chest. He's still angry, don't confuse the issue, but that's what men do. Once they can clear the air, they can move on. You fought him hand-to-hand, none of your magic, none of your tricks. He respected that."

Loki mulled her words over. She could be tricking him still, but it would be an elaborate ruse.

"It was not personal," he admitted.

"War rarely is," she agreed. "But it's still not an easy pill to swallow."

Loki stood, satisfied that he'd gotten all he came for.

Romanov returned to her work, still hidden by her hands. He paused for a moment at the door, his eyes assessing her work.

"You're quite good," he finally allowed. The Aesir placed such an emphasis on combat that any pastime not directly related to improving ones prowress in battle was considered a waste of time. They had the dwarves to design intricate works of art, best to leave useless tasks to inferior beings such as them.

Loki had never agreed with either sentiment.

Romanov didn't look up, but he caught the curve of her smile. "Thanks."

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o

Between missions, Loki discovered that beside walking and gardening, Rogers filled the time taking long runs or taking his bike out on rides.

During the war, he'd sent money back to a dealership to secure a '44 Harley. It had been paid for in full, Howard ensuring that Rogers would have something to look forward on his return, and it had since sat in storage for seventy years.

Loki knew that if he really wanted to hurt the man, all he'd have to do was destroy the bike and end his last tie to his old life.

But he never did.

Stark had mentioned in passing he'd be interested in buying it, and Rogers hadn't even deigned to answer him.

He invited Loki out, one early fall day.

The summer was giving up ownership of the year reluctantly, but a crisp wind was blowing from the north. It wasn't cold yet, but it would be soon. Rogers' plants knew it, even if no one else did, and the autumn vegetables were rapidly ripening on their vines and stalks.

Loki was in his room, reading a book Banner had lent him on coding when Rogers heralded his presence at his door with a slight knock.

Loki had taken to leaving his door open as Rogers was the only one besides Thor who ever visited him, and Loki had grown tired of standing to unlock the door whenever one of them came calling.

"Computer stuff?" Rogers said with a frown as he eyed the title. "I don't know how you understand that stuff."

"Mechanical things are logical, and are not unlike the magic of my own world."

Loki finished up the paragraph he'd been reading and looked up. He found it almost foolish at how easy it was to find out nearly anything on this planet with a simple trip to the library or a search on the Internet. Asgard's libraries were only open to a selected few, the scrolls of magic to even less.

"I guess I wouldn't master that, either," Rogers shifted his weight. "Anyway, I'm going to Vermont on my bike, if you're interested. The leaves are beautiful this time of year."

"We have trees in Asgard." Despite the many things they shared, Rogers had yet to invite him on his bike. Loki knew how private Rogers' rides were: he'd be gone for hours, and when he returned, he'd always key up his old music and Loki knew he'd been reminiscing again.

Somehow, in the intervening months, Loki'd begun to learn the names of Rogers' favorite songs and artists. He'd play "Take the "A" train" when he was in a cheerful mood, and "In a Sentimental Mood" when he wasn't.

"Not like this," Rogers insisted.

Loki leaned back in his chair, considering. There was no harm in it, and he took a certain enjoyment in seeing places he'd never seen before. In all the worlds, there weren't many such places, but he'd never taken care to travel Midgard as extensively as the other worlds, and certainly not Rogers' America.

Besides, he was sure Rogers wouldn't leave him alone until he agreed.

"Very well," he relented.

"Swell." And Rogers gave him one of his winning smiles. Loki allowed a small one in return. Somehow, this made Rogers' smile even wider, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

Rogers kept his bike park in Stark's garage, beside one of Stark's Harleys. Stark had numerous bikes of his own, both what he called "crotch rockets" and "cruisers" but Loki found the sleek lines of Rogers' bike the most appealing. Once they'd approached the bike, Rogers grabbed his helmet and tossed a new black and green one at Loki, who caught it automatically. It was all black except for "Sky Traveler" written in green loose script shadowed in gold on the back, and Loki realized Rogers' had had painted it for him.

Loki wasn't sure what to do with the gift, was slightly affronted that Rogers assumed they'd be going on enough bike rides together that he would need his own helmet. He tried to give the helmet back.

"I do not need this. I can protect us from any crash."

"Wear it." Rogers saddled his bike, pulling his own helmet on.

Loki sneered, his arm still stretched out.

"You're doing it again." Rogers chided mildly as he buckled his helmet. He looked at Loki expectedly. "Well, are you getting on or aren't you?"

Loki schooled his face, but remained standing.

"I do not require gifts from you."

Just for a moment, Rogers looked infinitely weary, as if the entire world weighed on him. But just as quickly, it was gone, and Loki wondered if he'd seen it at all. He had not; the smile was gone from Rogers' face.

"But I will accept it all the same," Loki allowed as slipped the helmet on, and climbed on behind the Captain.

Rogers drove with the same abandon with which he handled battle, and Loki thought on more than one occasion that they would be sure to crash. But the captain was as skilled at handling the motorcycle as he was at battle, and as I-87 gave way to NY-7, Loki found himself loosening his death grip around the captain's waist.

Fields became worn mountains, low and rolling and impressive in their vast pallet of dying trees. Loki could feel the crisp fall air on his face, the sweet smell of rot and harvest in his nose as buildings gave away to crops, ready for the harvest.

They rolled through sleepy New England towns between stretches of highway.

Heavily decorated, candy-colored houses were prepared for the Midgard holiday Halloween. Carved pumpkins that Rogers called "Jack-o-lanterns" grinned at them from bowed wooden steps.

Rogers slowed as they rolled into a town that a brightly painted sign declared to be "Bennington, Vermont, pop. 15,764."

They continued down the road, new suburban developments giving way to older homes in varying state of repair, some having already been renovated and others, with bowed porches and roofs, waiting for their renaissance. A wooden sign indicated they were entering "Historic Bennington, est. 1749."

Interspersed amongst the houses were churches and graves, old and crooked and Loki thought that there were as many dead in this town as there was living.

They pulled into a parking space in what appeared to be the heart of the tiny downtown. A tall Victorian-era house stood tall before them, faux graves standing crooked in a grassy yard. Scattered leaves in varying shades of red and orange had been raked carefully into piles around the childish graveyard.

Huge cotton spider webs had been hung carefully in the crooks and corners of the expansive porch. Pumpkins with various scowls lined the porch steps.

"Your culture makes light of death," Loki observed. He stumbled as he climbed off, expecting the world to still be moving and surprised it wasn't. His muscles ached from being tensed for so long. He tried to relax them without Rogers' notice.

Rogers looked up at the house as he unlatched his helmet.

"Sometimes, it's easier to find humor in something you don't understand," he said, pulling off his helmet, his blond hair mussed.

Swinging muscled legs over the bike, the captain secured it and stretched.

"I don't know about you, but I need to go to the bathroom, and some coffee is sounding pretty good right about now." He motioned to the house they had stopped in front of.

"It is an old holiday," Loki said, glancing at the sign. "Halloween."

"It is," Rogers agreed, holding the door open for Loki. A bell announced their arrival. "A Pagan holiday. On October 31st, the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to be thinnest, allowing the living to converse with the dead."

"Do they?" The warm smell of coffee and spices greeted them. A few patrons glanced up at the ringing bell, observed the pair, and returned to their conversations.

"If the dead were meant to talk, they would."

The floor plan of the house was the original. A bar crowded with pastries and an espresso machine greeted them in what once must have been the parlor. Rooms branched away from the front one. Loki could see that each had been painted brightly, scattered with pieces of furniture, likely originals, in varying states of disrepair.

The Captain ordered the pumpkin chai at the recommendation of the barista, and Loki went with his favorite tea, earl gray.

They took a small wobbly table on the porch. Loki would not admit it, but Rogers was right: the view _was_ astounding.

In Asgard, it was always summer. Winter would come at the end, but until then, the leaves were always bright and green. Loki had seen autumn before, but had never thought about it, had no cause to appreciate it.

Rogers took a sip from his drink, topped heftily with a helping of whipped cream. He blanched.

Noticing Loki's inquisitive expression, he explained "It's too sweet."

"I'll trade," Loki offered without warning or hesitation.

Rogers smiled knowingly and pushed the cup over.

The captain was right: it _was_ sweet, and it absolutely delicious. Loki smiled into his cup. Sugar was a rarity on Asgard, the climate better suited for cultivating bees and the honey they produced. Consequently, the Aesir had never mastered treats as the Midgardians had.

Rogers was much happier with his unsweetened tea, and he said as much. They fell into a companionable silence. The air was cooler here, and as the sun sunk below purple mountains, a crisp wind blow over the old town, fallen leaves scraping against ancient concrete.

"Did you celebrate this day?" Loki wondered aloud, his hands clasped around his cup. He relished the cold, but he knew Rogers didn't care for it.

Rogers face grew thoughtful, and he twirled the cup around on the table.

"My parents did. They'd come up with the most brilliant costumes. When I was young, they'd leave me with the nanny and go off to party. My parents always went as Cleopatra and Anthony. Mom was so beautiful. Later…" he trailed off, hands clenching around the coffee cup with such fierceness that Loki thought he might break it.

Loki knew the expression well enough: the man was caught up in his memories. Of late, Loki wished to grab Rogers by the shoulders and shake him, as if the simple motion would free him from the claws of the past.

Loki was many things, but his hypocrisy could only go so far. Not only was he bound by his past, but also the future. When he allowed himself, he saw a little of Rogers in himself, and in those moments, he realized the one he wanted to shake was himself, not Rogers.

Loki hadn't cared about what he'd done to his bonded, could not appreciate his losses even if he had, but as he tried to imagine his life without Rogers, it became increasingly hard. The man had begun to seep into the cracks of his soul. Instead of wearing them apart as water had occasion and wont to do, he was filling them in.

It frightened Loki more than Thanos, more than Chaos and more than his written future. He had never imagined another beside him in his long journey.

"It sounds trite," Loki sipped his tea, watching the captain's reaction over the lip of his cup. His words provided the desired reaction, and irritation flashed across the man's features. "Your team does not care for me," he said, if only to disrupt Rogers' morose thoughts. Loki felt increasingly responsible for the longing he knew Rogers had for those dead friends he would not see for a long, long time.

But that wasn't quite right, not as it had once been.

"That's not true, I think they're warming up. You could try and pretend to care about them, though. Ask questions about their days and things like that." Rogers tore his eyes away from house's windows, where he gazed at the patrons through glass fogged by time and looked at Loki.

"Why should I? I am a Prince. I was King. They are nothing."

But... Stark had more power than Loki liked to admit, and Banner controlled a monster that had bested him once already.

With each passing battle, with each day together in the tower, the team was becoming better, more powerful, and Loki knew that he did not have the chance to beat them he once did.

"They don't have titles, maybe," Rogers agreed, "But they are the best Earth has. And we've beaten you and your army before."

"They were mindless aliens," Loki sneered. "A child could have beaten them."

Rogers gave him a withering look, sparking the rage that was never far away.

"They were you troops. You lost. Against six Earthlings."

Loki fumed, staring out the window to where humans were shuffling along in the light of the setting sun, their hands filled with shopping bags and groceries, their school-aged children tagging along. They were so young and fragile, like Rogers' plants. Those plants, despite their obvious fallacies, were bearing fruit now, and while still fragile, had proved their usefulness.

"So don't discredit us," Rogers continued.

Loki thought it well Rogers made no mention of the multiple times he'd saved Loki on Yggdrasil's branches. He was not sure his pride could take it.

After night had fallen, their drinks cooled in the air, they descended the steps of the coffee house. The captain paused on the sidewalk, stooping down to rub his fingers over something on the pavement. When he stood, his eyes were distant, his face indiscernible.

Loki peered down at the sidewalk, plain in the yellow lights of the café.

Pressed into the cracking sidewalk was a fading child's handprint and a name scrawled in unwieldy letters beside the year, _1947._

0o0o0o0o0o

Barton had been spent on a mission by Fury to handle the leader of some rebel group in West Africa.

Since joining the Avengers, Loki gathered that Romanov and Barton were no longer at the beck and call of the American government as they had once been, but SHIELD still worked with them occasionally, agreeing to lend one or both out on clandestine missions.

Loki didn't miss Barton's presence, but Rogers was a bundle of tense nerves. Romanov was in Eastern Europe somewhere, but it was Barton's mission with questionable intelligence that had Rogers worried.

Loki watched as Rogers' pencil drove too heavy into the paper, tearing a hole in the fiber.

"I can ensure his safety," he finally offered, if for no other reason than to get away from Rogers' tension.

Rogers looked up, his eyes shooting to his hairline.

"Would you?"

"Yes," Loki said, and Rogers' room was replaced by an expansive blue sky and rolling golden sands.

He would never admit that he kept an eye on the team when they were out of the tower, but he knew exactly where Barton was.

His abrupt arrival stunned Barton's enemies. Their mouths gaped open, ancient human weaponry dropping slightly from where they'd been trained on Barton.

"Pitiful," Loki jeered, waving his hand outward. The rebels collapsed bonelessly to the crumbling rooftop. Satisfied that they would not be bothering him, he turned to appraised Barton.

"Loki?" The ranger sputtered. He was propped against the crumbling wall that ran the perimeter of the roof, bow clutched in one hand, the other pressing against a gaping wound to the leg.

Blood had pooled on the roof, mixing with the dust and sand to create red mud.

"You were sloppy," Loki accused.

"What—?" Barton scowled, looking uncertainly at his wound and then back up at Loki. "I haven't lost _that_ much blood."

"I'm not a hallucination," Loki snapped, stooping to haul Barton up, mindful of his wound.

Barton resisted for a moment before he put weight on his bad leg. Loki caught Barton as he slumped again him with a concealed groan.

"We knew your mission took a turn," Loki said. He hadn't told Steve that Barton's mission wasn't going well; he had thought things might improve around the Tower without Barton's discourteous nature.

After a week of torn sketches and moodiness on Steve's part, Loki realized Barton's death would make things worse, not better.

"But Fury said—" Barton trailed off. "Natasha, did she…?"

"The Captain was concerned." Loki shifted Barton's weight as he wove the spell that would take them home.

"_Steve_?" Loki thought he ought not sound so surprised. Steve had proven his dedication to his team several times over.

"You might vomit," Loki advised as he finished the spell. The world shifted around them, the dry, shifting desert of the Sahara replaced by the oppressive humidity of New York. Barton's knees gave way as Stark's Tower materialized beneath them.

Loki let him down.

The moment Barton's knees hit the terrace, he was on his hands and vomiting orange bile, mere feet from Steve's Victory garden.

Loki allowed him his privacy, looking out across the skyline he'd started to enjoy. It wasn't home, but it almost was.

When the sounds of retching ceased, Loki looked down.

"Are you quite done?"

"Er—" Barton wiped the back of his clean hand against his mouth. "Uh, yeah. I think so. I'm good."

"Good. A healer will be summoned." _Doctor_, he could hear Steve's voice in his head. "Doctor," he amended.

Barton settled back, both hands clutching his leg. The blood had slowed, a sluggish stream that dripped onto the roof. Beneath the schooled pain, Barton's face was stamped with uncertainty replacing the hate that had simmered there for months.

"You saved my life," Barton admitted grudgingly, and Loki thought it was redundant. "Why?"

"What I do is my business," Loki said, because it was easier than telling the truth. He was not ready to admit to himself the paradigm shift that was occurring, much less explain it to one who had recently wished his demise.

Before Barton could ask any more questions, the rest of the team was there, crowding around the ranger.

Banner was applying a pressure bandage and instructing him to hold it tight. Romanov, hair mussed and clearly having just returned from her own mission was at Barton's side, allowing him to sag against her. Steve helped her haul him up.

As they carried the ranger down to Banner's OR, Steve met Loki's eyes across the roof, his lips curling into a smile.

"Thanks," he said.

As something warm blossomed in Loki's chest, he realized that Steve had disarmed him more readily than any of his family's repeated attempts in centuries.

It frightened him in a way that few things did.

0o0o0o0o0o0o

Several days later, as Loki was lounging in the Queen Anne's chair JARVIS had ordered for him and reading the first volume of _The Birth of Britain _by Winston Churchill, a hesitant knock broke his concentration.

Barton was leaning against the frame of his door, a cane in his hand.

"Shouldn't you be in bed?" Loki wondered, turning a page of the book. The pages were well worn and obviously loved, and Loki idly wondered when Banner had the chance to read between all his studying and experiments.

"Wanna learn Gin Rummy?" Barton's expression was guarded, his pain evident in the lines on his face and the white knuckled grip on the ball of the cane.

"Is it a game?" Loki carefully marked his place and closed the book, turning his full attention on Barton as he wondered what the ranger was playing at.

"Cards." Barton shifted his weight, wincing briefly at the motion.

Loki frowned.

"You think me a child, that I would play human games with you?" It came out harsher than he'd intended, and rage briefly flashed across Barton's face.

"Forget it," he hissed, storming off.

Shortly after his angry, lopsided steps had disappeared down the hall, JARVIS interrupted Loki.

"Sir, if I may, I do believe that was an attempt at an apology."

"I know that," Loki scowled at the ceiling.

"Very well, sir," JARVIS agreed.

But he hadn't known that. He'd thought himself the expert in mankind. After all, he'd spent enough time on Earth. The only thing he'd learned since joining the Avengers was just how little he understood, and that he'd been sorely wrong to ever think otherwise.

"JARVIS?"

"Sir?"

"Where is Barton now?"

"He's still in the hallway. I believe his leg is paining him more than he is willing to admit."

"Idiot," Loki muttered, closing the book and settling it carefully back on the shelf.

JARVIS was right. Sure that no one was looking, Barton was leaning against the wall, his face pale and clenched in pain.

"Oh, you're still here," Loki said casually, as if his discovery was purely happenstance. Barton straightened immediately, squaring his shoulders and attempted to look stronger than he was.

"What do you want?"

"Human books can be tedious," Loki said, although he was quite taken by Churchill's work and had found that the multitude of worlds created by humanity's imagination far surpassed anything his own people had ever done. Barton stared back.

"And?"

"I decided to take a break," Loki replied. "Perhaps a child's game will suit."

Barton's look of surprise faded into one of suspicion, and he peered at Loki for a long moment.

Loki was afraid Barton would reject him, and he had a quick retort ready and a sneer to match, but Rogers' voice echoed in his head and he schooled his features, waiting patiently for Barton to make his move.

The archer's brows unknit, and although he didn't smile, he didn't look quite so angry.

"We can play in my room. I've got a table and some chairs."

He also had his pain meds there, which, if the beads of sweat gathered at his brow were any indication, he was of in sore need. Loki nodded.

"Very well. Let us play."

And if Loki followed Barton a little too closely to catch him should he fall, neither made mention of it. And when the ranger settled into the chair in his room, his leg stuck out in front of him, his face easing as his pain meds kicked in, Loki refrained from making any comments about the frailty of humans.

One day, he might kill this man, but as Barton explained the rules, allowing Loki to pull back cards played in error, Loki realized he was not as anxious for that day to come as he once had been.

A/N

If you've made it this very far, you (hopefully) like the piece. So, if this is true, please comment. I can see the traffic views, but with zero comments on the first part, I have zero idea how the reader is taking to the story.

I'll be posting the third part either tonight or tomorrow!


	3. With Any Sort of Certainty

Part III

_Who'd have thought we'd fought so long,_

_We started to see our enemies turn into friends, our friends to enemies_

_and we set somewhere in between._

With Any Sort of Certainy—Toh Kay

Disclaimers: These characters do not belong to me.

Props to my most amazing editor, Valylene

Loki had never cared for New York City: it was barren with its gray buildings and thick smog that settled over everything. This was particularly true now that the leaves had bidden their farewell from the trees for the year, becoming lonely skeletons that blended into the surroundings as if in shame, as cold as the sidewalks and streets they lined.

Most of Rogers' plants were only stalks now, and he'd cut them down for the season.

Only several squash remained but soon they, too, would be harvested, and the terrace would be barren once more: a graveyard to the summer.

As the days grew colder and winter started to set in, even Loki had noticed Steve's slow slide into something atypical of his usual persona. The manner of creature Steve had deteriorated to barely smiled, and his words were sparse. It seemed the world was leaving Steve's eyes with every day that passed.

What was more, Loki had even observed Steve's team members' concern over his gradual change of character.

Loki had just passed the library when he registered the figure inside.

Curious—for, surely the most introspective and sensitive of the Avengers would know what forces troubled Steve and had reduced him to this moping, miserable state—Loki backtracked to the open door.

Banner was sitting in the large, leather wingback he'd purchased for his own, particular use. As per usual, a book possessed his attention as a lamp bathed him in a halo of golden light, and he seemed unperturbed by the gloomy light that streamed in through the massive windows.

"I do not care for this weather," Loki announced as he leaned against the doorframe, if only to establish that he didn't care much for _anything_, and to hint that this wretched season was the fault of humanity.

"It's not that bad," Banner argued mildly, turning a page without bothering to look up. Loki frowned in irritation: he had stooped to speak to this mortal, wanted his input, and he being _ignored_.

Loki bit back his words, knowing Banner's responses would be mild and that the altercation would only serve to delay him from his goal.

"I have not spent much time amongst mortals," Loki tried again.

This time, Banner looked up. His book still spread open on his lap, waiting for his return if he found whatever Loki had to say unworthy of the distraction. Loki felt his ire bubble.

"But is it not odd that Rogers' mood has changed so dramatically these last few days?"

Realization dawned on Banner's face as he secured his place with a bookmark and set the book aside.

"Things have been quiet the last few days so I haven't been around much, but you're right," Banner said slowly. "I expect that in Asgard you have holy days to commemorate those fallen in battle?"

"Naturally."

"Ours is the eleventh of this month," he said, raising his eyebrows significantly, allowing Loki to piece together the implication.

"It was a holiday officially designated by the government to align with the ending of World War I. On November 11th at 11 AM, an armistice was declared, and hostilities would cease between the offending countries. Despite the numbers of lives lost, and it being called 'the war to end all wars', it only set the stage for the war Steve fought in. I have a few books on the subject if you're interested," Banner motioned to a shelf in his library. "You should try _All Quiet on the Western Front_."

Loki scanned the titles of the books, eventually finding the one Banner had indicated specifically. The book was thin, and Loki did not think it would offer the knowledge he sought. He took it anyway and straightened, the small tome clasped in his hand.

"I give you my thanks," he offered rigidly.

Bruce eyed him for a moment, as if he'd never seen him before and was judging Loki's character for the first time.

Loki was offended that he'd registered so low on Banner's consideration that he felt compelled to say something, to demand respect, when Banner motioned to an open chair and said, "My library is open to you, just return whatever you borrow."

Loki's words died in his mouth. Floundering for a moment, he took the proffered chair with as much dignity as he could muster. Unwilling to squander the little bit of good will he'd managed between them, he hesitantly took the book Banner had indicated and opened it.

It wasn't until much later, nearly three quarters of the way into the book, that he realized what it meant for Banner to open his reading room to Loki. He looked sharply up at Banner, but the man continued ignoring him, glasses perched on the edge of his nose.

0o0o0o0o0

Without the garden to occupy his time, Rogers had taken to watching war films late at night.

Loki chanced upon him by accident, but instead of announcing his presence, he lurked in the door unnoticed. He rarely had the opportunity to observe the captain with his shields down. Seemingly alone, he didn't hold himself quite so rigidly. He complained to the screen when its depiction of war was inaccurate or the terminology was wrong.

For whatever reason, he'd taken to falling asleep in front of the flickering TV, his legs jutted out in front of him, his arms crossed and head fallen back against the couch.

In sleep, his face eased and he looked younger than Loki had ever seen him. It was easy to forget that, despite technically being over ninety years old, he was still in his twenties.

At JARVIS' suggestion, he started watching _The Pacific_ and Loki watched Steve watch the miniseries. He told himself it was because he was interested in the show, and that was true, but not the reason why he stood late night vigil.

At the end of the series, when Eugene Sledge finally came home to his family, silver tears reflected the pale light of the television on Steve's face.

Even alone, he was not a man prone to elaborate displays of emotion. His chest heaved for air as silent sobs rocked his body. Thinking himself alone, he curled in on himself, his hands on his face as he wept.

Loki stood silently in the shadow of the door.

His first instinct was to label Rogers weak and revel in his obvious failing. But Steve Rogers could never go home again, and he'd made sure that Loki could.

Rogers was not a friend, but he was the closest thing Loki had.

He felt his stomach churn.

The next day, Loki sought the captain out, unsurprised to find him in his room, and curled around his sketchpad.

Loki knocked on the door lightly, somehow feeling as though he were treading on things best left private. Rogers looked up in surprise, hand paused over the page.

Loki could see that the curve of his hand was smudged in pencil.

"Is everything okay?" Rogers asked, closing his notepad on the smiling faces of dead friends.

Damn him for being so _concerned_. Loki could feel the melancholy radiating from the man, but it didn't keep him from worrying about his teammates—worrying about Loki.

"I am bored," Loki declared. For the briefest of moments, irritation flashed across Rogers' face, and Loki felt victorious to have broken through the hero's all-consuming wall of self-pity.

"I don't know what you expected me to do about it," Rogers said with more ice than Loki was accustomed to.

Perhaps he had misjudged just how deeply Rogers was entrenched in his reminiscing. Loki could hardly understand being so consumed with those long dead, but he tried to think of a world with Rogers no longer in it. Would he lament in this way?

Fear slid an icy hand around his heart. Like a rising tide, his reliance on Rogers how come so slow and steady that he hadn't realized it until he was nearly drowning.

"Nothing," Loki hissed and turned hastily, afraid of what he was becoming.

"Hey! Wait!" Rogers called out, scrambling after him. Loki turned in the hallway to find Rogers at the door, his face apologetic.

Loki seethed. He _hated_ Steve Rogers: _hated_ how giving he was, how honest and wholesome.

The man plowed on heedlessly, running a hand through mussed hair.

"Did you want to do something?"

"Not with you," Loki turned too late, saw the hurt on Rogers' face before he stormed down the hall.

Even alone in his room, he could not free himself from the lingering sadness in Rogers' eyes, the way his shoulders had been drawn tight as if it could fend off hurt. It came to no surprise that Rogers was at his door not much later. He stuck his head in hesitantly.

"Do you not have other things to concern yourself with?" Loki preempted. He ignored the dark rings under Rogers' eyes—things, Loki had learned, that came from sleepless nights and tortuous dreams.

"I was thinking on going for a ride, if you're interested...?" The captain offered as a peace offering. "I've been needing to go somewhere, anyway." He remained at the door, unwilling to breach the threshold without Loki's permission.

He didn't give it.

Loki hesitated so long in his response that Rogers had begun to draw away. Inexplicably, or perhaps entirely _too _interpretable, Loki didn't want that.

"Fine," he said quickly, refusing to acknowledge the feeling that came with the wan smile given in return.

Rogers didn't tell him where they were going, and Loki didn't ask. He knew enough of America's geography to infer that they were headed south this time when a sign welcoming them into New Jersey. The crowded skyline gave way to trees in Pennsylvania and briefly, Delaware.

Humans had a way of closeting themselves from nature and the dangers that lurked in the unknown. As long as Loki had observed humanity, they had flocked together, anxious to block out the darkness.

It was late afternoon when they hit DC. They ground to a stop when they hit 495, commuters escaping to their suburban homes and clogging the road after a hard day's work.

Loki was used to feeling the rumble of Rogers' voice under his hands when he took opportunities to speak to Loki during stops in traffic, but his bonded remained silent, leaving Loki to his own thoughts.

As they entered the city, Loki found he appreciated the low buildings redolent in the style made famous in ancient Rome.

They rode through the streets, passing a massive, tannish building only five stories high and five sides—a strange pentagon that betrayed its size and towards a statue modeled after the vapors of a jet.

Three white, tapering arcs reached into the sky, but as they grew closer, Loki realized it was not the statue they were headed to, but the graveyard beside it.

They rolled to a stop, and Loki couldn't help but marvel at the number of dead that occupied the well-manicured lawn.

"This is Arlington Cemetery," Rogers broke his silence as he climbed off the bike. "My friends are here."

He said nothing: found he did not know what to say. After securing their helmets to the bike, Loki followed Rogers to the visitor's center. The building was fairly crowded but its visitors spoke only in hushed whispers.

There were several heavy tomes, thousands of pages each. Loki bent over Roger's shoulder as he flipped through worn pages full of names, following his finger down the page until he found a name and scratched the location onto provided paper. He continued until a list of names lined the paper.

Loki didn't have to ask to know that each page of all the books was filled with as many names.

When he was done, paper clenched in his hand, Rogers grabbed a map and strode out towards a far corner of the cemetery.

Loki followed silently.

Save for a few anomalies, the marble rows of America's dead stood in silent, identical sentinel of white curved stone and black letters. Flags stood on every grave, and those of the newest wars sported wreaths and flowers.

Enormous looming trees stood guard over the dead, and, as he watched, a cold wind rattled through the lonely branches, stripping the last of dying leaves free.

Humans of varying ages stood in front of the stones. Those in the newest sections were filled with young men and women; brothers and sisters; wives and husbands.

As Steve took them to an older portion of the cemetery, past those of the dead of Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam and Korea towards the World War II section, the stones—and the people—were older, but the sorrow in their eyes was no less intense.

Loki felt like he was treading on something forbidden, something private. He did not belong here, among America's dead.

Had he had his way, he would've caused many more to join its ranks. He knew now (but had not known then) that America would have defended herself with every measure necessary—that should the Avengers fall, should the nuclear weapon not have wiped out Loki and his army—she would have provided her own men and women to stop his march forward.

Loki had expected humans to put up a resistance, but he hadn't realized the cost until he walked among their dead. He was discomforted to realize the dark part of him that whispered that he wouldn't have cared even if he _had_ known.

Their steps slowed when they reached the older part of the cemetery. A quick scan of the stones indicated that there were graves older still, but while little American flags stood before the stones, they were absent of the sad collection of humanity.

As Loki glanced at the stone Rogers had come to rest before, noting _Sergeant James Buchanan_, rank and date of death in sharp relief against the stone, he realized that those who would have visited these dead, that had left a piece of their heart when they'd buried their loved ones in the ground, had gone already to meet their fathers and their brothers and their husbands.

No more would the living come to remember them.

Beyond a handful of ancient women, their skin as paper and their faces worn and lined, Rogers was alone in this part of the cemetery.

Loki realized that soon enough, Rogers would be the only one left to remember all his dead. He glanced over at his bonded, bent over Buchanan's grave.

He knew enough about Rogers' old team to know that most had had no remaining immediate family: had never had a chance to make a family of their own.

Loki stood a few meters away, allowing Rogers his peace. He pretended not to hear the man who was no longer a hero in this moment, broken before his friend's grave, whisper his agonized apology for not being able to prevent his death.

Loki had read Buchanan's citation, had read the after action report that Rogers had made, and knew that there was nothing Rogers could have done.

He also knew that saying so would not assuage Rogers' guilt.

They visited Corporal Morita's grave next, followed by Lance Corporal Falsworth, and all the rest of Rogers' old team.

Most of them had died after Steve's disappearance, either in the taking of Berlin, or some other skirmish leading up to it.

Colonel Phillips was in a different section, a casualty of the Korean War. Loki had read his citation, too. He'd read up on all the wars America had ever been involved in, and realized he should've done so before his ill-fated attempt to conquer the world.

When the captain was done, he looked old, his young face betraying his real age, and Loki thought he might be close to the breaking. The thought worried him in a way that was wholly unfamiliar and entirely unwanted.

As they headed out of the cemetery, Rogers paused as a procession headed by a horse-borne coffin towards the newer section of the graveyard passed them.

A Marine clad in white gloves passed a folded American flag to a sobbing woman all in black, a veil hiding her face. Her hand was clasped tightly around the hand of her daughter, a child no older than three.

Loki refused to acknowledge the wetness in Rogers' eyes or his own feelings of uncertainty.

They waited until the coffin had been lowered until the ground and shots fired in honor of the man before they left the hallowed grounds. Rogers didn't speak for the entirety of their journey home.

The next morning, Loki prepared breakfast.

After months of watching Rogers, he felt proficient in the art of trying his hand at the task. Loki realized, belatedly as he served rubbery eggs and burned bacon, cooking was more than just putting protein into a hot skillet: it required more skill than he was wont to admit.

Steve entered the common room early, looking at him with ancient eyes, and suddenly, it was Steve, and Loki realized he could no longer buffer a distance between them through the usage of his last name.

"Did you poison it?" Steve asked as he jabbed the food.

"Not this time," Loki said.

Steve looked up in surprise at the joke, smiling thinly, and Loki felt something shift in his chest.

00o0o0o0o0o

After Veterans Day, Steve's mood began to improve.

Within days, he had returned to his old self, occupying himself with the concerns of the team, busying his day with projects around the Tower and inviting Loki to help.

On the 20th of November, while the team was gathered in the den, Loki paying more attention to Barton's Burn Notice than he would've liked to admit, Steve declared they would have Thanksgiving dinner in the Tower.

Stark raised a skeptical eye, glancing up from his most recent designs of a new suit. He'd started to spend a lot of time around the team and Loki wondered if Steve had spoken to Stark, or if the man had naturally migrated to the den for most of his projects that didn't require manual work.

Regardless, Loki found that the man's sharp sense of humor and snappy answers no longer irritated him as it had; indeed, he had begun to appreciate his acerbic wit.

"What do you know about turkeys?" Stark asked.

"Nothing," Steve admitted, flipping through _The Joy of Cooking_. "But I aim to learn."

"I do love a good turkey," Pepper declared as she snuggled against Stark, who was making adjustments to his designs that they quibbled over quietly.

"We're going to brine it," Steve said in response, turning another page.

Pepper rose from the couch to settle beside Steve, reading over the passage on cooking turkeys he'd discovered.

"It won't dry out in the oven."

On the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day, Steve summoned everyone to the kitchen to aid in the stuffing. He set Romanov and Barton to shredding the bread as Banner melted butter to pour onto it. Once the dish had begun to take shape, Tony poured his open beer over it for good measure.

"Because everything's better with beer," he declared.

Thor, who had loudly announced that cooking was below him—however, Loki saw the way Thor eyed Romanov's knife as she made a turnip dish and the way Pepper handled the multiple pans on the stove and wondered if his brother was instead daunted by the process but too proud to admit it—regaled them instead with stories of Asgard and the Warriors Three.

Steve had explained the concept of Thanksgiving to him, and he'd readily taken to the idea.

Thor was never one to turn down a feast.

Where Loki always knew where he stood he with the Aesir, he found the ground was always shifting with humans.

Unbound by a written fate or unlimited years of life, humans were much quicker to forgive. He had been sure Barton would always be his sworn enemy.

Perhaps mortality wasn't quite the fallacy he'd once thought.

The knowledge of death drove humanity in a way the Aesir would never understand. Every human struggled to be significant in his or her own way: to mark the world before they succumbed.

For the first time, Loki felt guilty for taking that away from Steve. It was true that he would have lived longer than most, but Loki hadn't been lying when he'd told him that the serum was breaking down in his blood. He'd thought he'd given the man a gift.

As he looked around the table, saw the sparse grays on Stark's dark mop of hair and the developing grooves around Romanov's mouth on an otherwise flawless face, he realized he'd stolen something instead.

The Black Widow had cooked up the extras that came with the turkey, and satisfied that they were done cooking, she pulled them from a simmering pot.

"I'll split the neck," Romanov offered, her eyes shooting to Loki as if she'd known he was thinking of her.

"All right," Barton agreed, focused once more on seasoning the stuffing. Loki saw the soft smile she gave Barton, and he suddenly grew irritated with this slow dance they were in. He wanted to shake Barton. _You don't have much time_, he wanted to say.

None of them did, except for he and his brother, and Steve, the hapless immortal that would survive his whole team again, commemorating their faces into his sketchbook.

_What have I done_? Loki wondered. He was unused to questioning his actions, and he found the whole thing had put him in a foul mood.

When they were done with the brine, an aromatic concoction made up in a bucket as nothing else was large enough to serve, Pepper held a bag open as Steve slipped the turkey in. Closing the fridge door, Pepper wiped her hands on Steve's apron, who laughed and pulled away.

"It'll be absolutely divine tomorrow," she promised.

The team gathered around the table. Romanov provided a bottle of vodka and demanded shots. Steve laughed and deferred, his eyes warm as he watched the rest of his team grow steadily rowdier.

As Stark demanded they watch as he attempted a handstand, Steve told Loki the story of Thanksgiving. It was quaint and cute, and not unlike the many feasts the Aesir held on numerous occasions for numerous reasons, most often to celebrate the return of some victorious warrior—or his glorious death. The Aesir weren't picky in their reasons behind a feast.

Loki gathered that Thanksgiving was a holiday meant for families, but nobody had spoken of traveling to parts unknown, and Loki wondered if all the team's kin were dead. He'd never cared to inquire into their histories, and none had volunteered them.

When the preparations were complete for the feast to follow on the morrow, the team began dispersing back to their rooms.

While Romanov and Thor were helping Barton out, Loki sought out Stark. The man was already overly verbose on any given day, but with alcohol to fuel him, Loki knew if he could just direct the conversation the way he wanted.

He found him in the garage, which was no surprise. Stark looked up briefly as JARVIS allowed Loki in, the doors swishing closed behind him. A brief look of annoyance faded into resigned acceptance.

"JARVIS, you're a traitor," Stark told his AI before returning to his work on the engine of one of a car frame. He'd stripped the metal away, leaving the scrap in a pile he couldn't be bothered with.

Bulky mechanical parts were laid out in meticulous order, and Loki wondered briefly to their purpose.

"Are you building a car?" Loki didn't really care, but he usually saw vehicles as a whole, and it was unusually interesting to see the sum of its parts spread out across tables.

Stark's eyebrows shot up as he looked at Loki, mouth agape.

"Why Loki, have you finally deigned my projects worthy of your attention?"

Loki scowled, settling into an open rolling chair and leaning back, steepling his fingers.

"You offend me."

"I am sorry, my Lord," Stark offered an exaggerated bow, stumbling slightly as he straightened. "I assure you, it won't happen again."

Loki thought he heard him add, "pretentious ass" under his breath, and breathed his irritation out through his nose.

Stark seemed to rely on abrasiveness when he was uncertain in some human attempt to display confidence.

When Loki didn't answer, Stark relaxed, the wrench in his hand loosening slightly, and Loki realized he'd been looking for a fight.

"Thanksgiving is meant for familiar gatherings," Loki began carefully. "And yet, none of you have returned to your ancestral homes."

Stark squinted at Loki as he frowned, his expression settling into suspicion.

"Yeah, what's your point?"

"Why?"

Stark's suspicion mixed with confusion, and he leaned against the frame of the car as he crossed his arms. He considered Loki a long time, his mouth working as he chewed on a cheek.

"Why?" He finally echoed back. "Why do you care? You don't care about anyone but you."

Loki bristled.

"This was a mistake," he declared loudly, standing to make a hasty exit, cursing himself.

He hadn't been here to gather intelligence: not this time. Ancestral ties meant _everything_ on Asgard, slights made generations past guiding the actions of the Aesir today in some misguided attempt to earn justice for dead fathers and great grandfathers, and so on, hundreds of years past. He'd assumed the same was true for humans.

Loki was at the door when Stark finally answered him, voice low.

"Maybe we're all the family any of us have."

0o0o0o00o

The dining room table was an ostentations thing.

"Is anything Stark owns not?" Loki had asked Steve dryly upon first seeing the opulent monstrosity. Steve had ignored him.

A massive walnut table, it had heavy legs that curled into claws, intricate carvings edged into the sides of the table and chairs. Pepper said it had been in the Stark family for many generations.

Since they ate all their meals in the kitchen, the table was in sore need of dusting, which Wells had done, wiping the wood down with some chemical that was supposed to smell of lemon but was sorely lacking in its mimicry.

Pepper helped with the place settings. Ornate flowers lined ancient china rimmed in gold. Loki offered to help, feeling useless otherwise but wondering why he bothered. Pepper accepted his help readily, pushing plates into his arms as she set the silverware.

"These look expensive," Loki studied the intricate designs in the plates. They were worthy of any Dwarven artisan.

"Priceless," Pepper followed behind Loki with silverware. "They were Tony's moms, and her mom's before that. I don't know how far they go back, and he says he never cared to ask, so now we'll never know." Pepper huffed with familiar irritation. "I guess we can always get it appraised."

"Tony," Loki was uncomfortable with the name—with the way the team was slipping past his defenses. "Speaks little of his those who bore him."

"No," Pepper agreed slowly as she delicately set the plates down. "I met Howard, once, right before his death but I never met his mom. Howard was obsessed with finding Steve, felt he'd failed him somehow. I think he was so consumed with his search and the development of a better world for humanity that he forgot his son was a boy just like any other."

Loki liked Pepper. Once, he would have labeled her a simpleton who had no business playing in the world of gods and super humans, but he found her honesty and forwardness refreshing.

After seeing her bandy words with the team, having seen her handle Stark's empire, Loki began to appreciate that lacking physical prowess or magic did not make her weak.

Stark seemed to want to keep her protected, and usually that meant being as far away from the team and the trouble they seemed to attract as possible

As Loki had nearly been the cause of Stark's untimely demise, he expected her to be much more brusque with him than she was.

As he finished laying the plates, Loki tried to remind himself that he was here for intelligence. He filed the information she gave him away, putting it in the same place he stored all the knowledge he'd garnered in all the months since coming to live in the Avenger's Tower.

If he was honest with himself, he knew he knew more than enough to sufficiently cow the Avengers.

_Tomorrow_ he promised himself everyday, but tomorrows had a way of stacking up.

The table set, Pepper called the team in. She and Stark were at the heads of the table, the rest of the team settling organically to seats of their choosing. Loki sat next to Steve and across from Thor. Steve insisted Stark start out with the toasts.

"Toasting?" Tony squinted at his drink.

"You bought a couple of hundred dollar bottles of champagne," Barton pointed out. "You might as well."

"To fortune," Stark finally offered with a raise of his goblet. Sparkling champagne sloshed over the sides, spilling onto his hand. He cursed.

"You can do better than that," Banner chided.

Stark stared at his silver goblet, his eyes growing distant and his face closed. A muscle jumped in his jaw. He refocused his eyes, first looking across at Pepper before his eyes slid across the rest of the team.

"When I was a child, holidays rituals were demanded by my mother. My father, despite his promises, was often absent, and so it was usually just me, mom, Obidiah and whatever cousins we could get together. In the years after her death, I've spent this holiday at whatever charities Pepper declared worth my time. This year, she insisted you lot were worth it. Cheers, to holidays without deadbeat dads," Tony's light words betrayed his tone, and not for the first time Loki wondered if everything Tony said was actually the truth, but because he was so flippant, people tended to ignore him.

"Cheers!" Thor crowed, heartily clinking his goblet against Steve's proffered glass before he swung around, ebulliently toasting each teammate in turn.

By the end of it, his glass was nearly empty, most of the champagne on the table.

"The point is to keep the beverage _in_ the cup," Bruce said with an amused smile.

"To the first Thanksgiving in over seventy years," Steve said, raising his glass.

The team echoed the sentiment, the ringing of silver against silver filling the room once more. Loki slowly added his own, pulling it away quickly when he saw Thor trying to connect.

Once the toasts were over, they plowed into the food. Gentle banter and trivial conversation occupied their time between copious helpings. Loki pushed the food around on his plate. He knew he had finally achieved what he'd always meant to do and infiltrated the team as well as he could.

Instead, he felt like a charlatan. Even if he managed to kill them, managed to somehow break his bond with Steve, where would he go? Back to Asgard? To Jotunheim? Both peoples has expressed their hatred for him, he could not expect a warm welcome from either.

Instead, he had finally found acceptance in this ragged team of misfits, and they had more reason than most to hate him.

Maybe _they_ were tricking _him_ and were luring him into a false sense of security. Loki glanced up quickly, halfway hoping he'd stumbled onto a truth that would free him from the growing chains of responsibility that threatened to bind him.

Steve, sensing his gaze, slid brilliant blue eyes to meet his own, an unguarded smile on his face fading as he realized Loki hadn't eaten any of the food before him.

"You okay?" He whispered as he leaned in, concern lacing his words. Loki could feel his warm breath on his cheek, acutely aware of how _alive_ Steve was, and he could not imagine stealing that away from him, too.

"I'm fine," Loki said a little loudly, pushing away from the table. "I'll be in my room," he informed the team, their raucous laughter quieting as he made his exit. They took up again quickly after his departure, their voices following him down the hall.

It was Steve's eyes, boring holes into his back, that bothered Loki most of all.

0o0o0o0o

One day in mid December, months after what the team had termed the Monopoly Affair, Barton offered to teach Loki how to play a new game of cards.

Loki was surprised. After their one game of gin rummy, they'd settled into an uneasy truce. Short words and cold glares were replaced with wary ambivalence, and if it was all the better things would become, it was fine with Loki.

They set up a game in the den. It was something called poker, which was, Barton assured him, a very respectable game.

As it turned out, the ranger was very good, and Loki was unused to losing. After several hands lost, he scowled.

"You're cheating," he accused.

"Or maybe you finally found something you're not good at," Barton returned with more amiability than Loki felt was called for. "Besides, you know, fighting us."

Loki felt his hackles rise, and wondered if they were in for another fight. He wouldn't be caught off guard again. He had thought things improved between them, but with Barton, he could never be sure.

"Maybe you should count on Beginner's Luck." Tony stopped his passage through the room to watch them. He leaned heavily against the back of Loki's chair, his breath hot against his neck.

"Do you _mind?_" Loki hissed, trying to pull away from him, annoyed when Tony laughed.

"You should probably fold," Tony offered. Loki didn't to spite him, and cursed when Barton won that hand, too.

"Can't say I didn't warn you," Tony grinned, sliding into an empty chair at the table, the folder in his hand forgotten. His dark eyes sparkled, and Loki found he was entirely too amused by Loki's continued losses.

Steve chanced in, settling in beside Loki who quickly banned the man from helping him. The leader of the Avengers was far too expressive. He telegraphed Loki's cards to Barton before Loki even knew what his hand meant.

Sometimes, he wondered how Steve had made it this far in life as a master tactician when he couldn't even play a poker game without giving away a hand.

"Let's go for a walk," Steve offered after another hand lost. Loki threw the cards down with a sneer and accepted. Steve seemed to know before Loki did when he was ready to snap, insisting that the cold air would do them some good.

The December air was crisp and biting.

New York's humid cold had a way of seeping into Loki's bones in a way that Jotunheim never had, and he was frustrated that even Midgard's cold slipped past his defenses.

Their walks in the city had grown scarcer as winter tightened her hold on the city. Steve didn't offer a reason, but he didn't need to. Loki had seen the stark fear in his eyes in Nilfheim when he'd thought they'd be doomed to walk the ice fields forever.

As they walked the streets, Loki observed the reconstruction that had occurred since their last trip. He would never admit it aloud, but he was impressed by the human's ability to persevere.

Even now, scaffolding stood against the buildings that could be repaired. Those that couldn't had been razed and the bones of new ones stood in their stead.

"I may not be great at cards—" Steve started, his voice muffled by his scarf. Loki looked over. Vapor escaped around the woolen scarf with every breath. He'd pulled his hat down as low as it would go, but his exposed cheeks and nose were rosy from the cold. "—but I know a bad guy when I see him. Or her," He added as an afterthought.

"Really?" Loki asked with a raised eyebrow. Fat, wet flakes started to fall from swollen clouds.

It wasn't quite cold enough yet, and the miserable precipitation melted on impact, quickly turning the sidewalks into a slushy muck.

Steve nodded earnestly.

"It's part of my super power," he claimed, stepping around a growing puddle of slush.

Loki assessed Steve. He paused in his steps, the wet flakes gathering on his nose.

"You lie!" He hastened to catch up.

Rogers gave him a winning smile, the edges of his lips visible around the scarf.

"But you believed me," Steve said. "Maybe I'm not as bad at cards as you think."

Loki realized to think that he knew his bonded, even after all this time, was folly. To think he could box all humans into one mold had ensured his loss of world domination before he'd even begun.

The forecast displayed in Times Square promised falling temperatures, brought in from an early front from the Artic, and the possibility of a White Christmas.

"Oh, that'd be nice, wouldn't it?" Steve enthused, carefully moving around a crowd of holiday shoppers bound their way. Christmas carols poured out with blasts of warm air as opened doors exposed buildings to the cold.

"I thought you hated the cold."

"I do," Steve admitted. "I've never enjoyed it, honestly, but Christmas is my favorite time of year."

"That doesn't make sense," Loki frowned, growing irritated by the loudly ringing bell of some freezing human with a red bucket, and of the constant press of people. Steve stopped suddenly, Loki bumping into him.

"What—" he began in irritation, his eyes following Steve's to see what had fascinated enough to issue a stop.

Behind a massive glass window under a huge sign declaring the store to be F.A.O Schwartz, an intricate winter wonderland had been painstakingly created. Loki rolled his eyes, wondering what it was that had grabbed Steve's attention.

Children came and went around him, and still Steve stood, fixated on a shiny red train rumbled around a track that traversed a fictional world of cotton snow and plastic houses, its boxcars filled with bags of tiny, shiny gifts.

Loki thought he had the patience of the ages, but Steve was trying it.

"I had one of these, when I was young. We had a track around the Christmas tree," Steve remembered slowly.

Loki found his irritation evaporate like vapors of breath. He'd tried to piece together Steve's life before his serum, as if by doing so, he could solve the enigma that was Steve Rogers, but the record keeping from that era was disappointingly sparse, and although Loki had entertained traveling to that time and witnessing it for himself, it was a violation he wasn't sure he was willing to make anymore.

Instead, he'd read up on the rise and fall of New York's prestigious families following the crash of 1929. If Steve's father had been like any of the other elite, it was an easy assumption that the man had also bet, and lost all of his fortune, on speculation.

"How did you get to your presents?" Loki squinted at the train, trying to find the appeal, trying to imagine the fragile boy Steve had once been.

"We reached around it," Steve said. "It was wonderful. The servants brought in a great pine tree from Vermont. The whole Great Room smelled of pine. My mother held onto her heirloom ornaments after..." Steve trailed off.

"The train is one of the first things we sold when we lost everything."

"It seems frivolous," Loki observed, attempting to soften the blow of treasures lost.

"It was any boy's dream," Steve sighed.

"You are no longer a boy."

"No," Steve agreed, lingering for a moment longer before pulling himself away from the window. They joined the heavy throngs of holiday shoppers. The ambivalent rain had turned into snow that stuck with enthusiasm to the asphalt.

They walked silently, shouldering their way through the holiday crowds. Steve insisted they watch the lighting of the tree at Times Square. Loki relented, although he expected to be unimpressed. A tree in lights was still a tree, and he'd seen many of those.

"You said Christmas is your favorite time of year, yet you hate the cold," Loki prompted as they moved past a gaggle of women exiting a place called "Escada." Steve was very rarely a contradiction, so this surprised Loki.

"Because people always try to be the best they can," Steve said. "Even when they have nothing."

If the shoppers weighted down in bags and brightly wrapped boxes were any indication, _these_ people weren't part of the have-nothings.

"For a birth of a baby?" Loki jeered, because he knew nothing could derail Steve's melancholy faster than a philosophical discussion. Steve was nothing if not predictable in defense of his beliefs, but Loki found he enjoyed the anchor of stability that it offered.

"It's more than just that," Steve said dismissively. "Christmas allows people to be the best of themselves, the best they can hope to be, even when there's nothing, there's hope. That's what Christmas is."

"Don't your celebrate your savior's death in four months and then ignore him again for the rest of the year?" Loki asked with raised eyebrows, smirking when Steve huffed, glaring at him.

"You're missing the point," he complained fondly, brushing gathered snow off his coat.

"I don't understand why you believe in a god you've never seen when there's proof all around he's never been." It was becoming a tired argument, but the familiar lines served to be the disruption Steve needed.

"There's things in this world I'd have called magic seventy years ago," Steve stepped onto the street to avoid a rush of tourists, human adolescents on a trip from the look of it, their faces unlined yet by time, their cheeks rosy. "But even science points towards God. One day, even you will die. We both will." Loki ignored the poignancy in his statement, the slight wistfulness that accompanied his tone.

"At the end of the world. Our sagas dictate it. I have met the Fates. Have you?" They frightened him, the sisters three. Before he'd even been born, they'd detailed his life and death, and he was simply a pawn in a story they'd already written.

He wondered where Steve fit into all of this, wondered if things had changed with the human's arrival in his life.

Fear wrapped a hand around his heart and squeezed, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold ran through him.

He wondered if Steve wasn't in the sagas was because something happened to him first, and the Fates hadn't bothered to dictate this part of Loki's life because it didn't matter in their great scheme.

Predictable Steve, an anchor in a maelstrom of shifting allegiances, a welcome break from the subterfuge and lies that Loki had spent centuries cloaking himself in and against was nothing more than a happy interruption from the slow march forward towards Ragnarok.

He wasn't even worth a footnote in the annuals of the Sagas, of what had been and what was yet to come.

Loki had allowed himself to grow complacent in Steve's presence, had bought into the reality he fabricated where Loki was part of a mortal team and Sunday afternoons were spent on bike rides into the country. He'd never even realized the trap that was closing in on him.

He'd been so worried with alienating his own kind to dampen the severity of their deaths that he'd allowed Steve to wiggle past his defenses, and now he had the growing suspicion that Steve would be dead much sooner than those he'd spent centuries working on distancing.

"It doesn't matter," Steve said shortly, oblivious to Loki's growing fears. "You say you're a god, but waits for you? Hell, still?"

"When I am dead, what does it matter? I will no longer be here," Loki repeated his rote line sharply.

He missed the curious look Steve gave him as he realized no, that couldn't be right. They were bonded, and Steve's death was his own. Unless, of course, he'd found a way to divorce himself from it by the time of Ragnarok, which would mean he was the likely cause of Steve's demise after all.

"If that's what you believe, I won't argue with you, but I've read your sagas and they indicate otherwise,"

"I will have served my roll."

But Loki had no desire to play that part anymore, had always found it wanting. It was worse, now, to realize his escape was nothing more than a vacation not worth mentioning. Steve bumped a shoulder into his own, startling Loki.

"'That which is eternal cannot die, and with strange eons, even death may die.' Tell me, Loki, how can you be a god, when you will die?" The smile on his face betrayed any venom in the words. Loki frowned at him.

"Is that your Bible?" He'd taken care to read it, but there were enough versions in enough languages that he may have lost something in the translation he'd read.

"No," Steve grinned.

"What have you done to me, Steve Rogers?" Loki tried to imagine a future where he killed Steve, and while escalating schemes of increasingly violent deaths had once consumed him, now he found them wanting. Loki would not be better off for it. As sure as their lives were intertwined, Steve had filled in the gaps in his soul with his own, and now a future without him seemed empty.

It was as deadly a trap as Loki had ever known.

"Loki?" Steve's brow furrowed and he reached out to place a calming hand on Loki's shoulder. Loki slapped it away, ignoring the hurt look on Steve's face as Loki felt the unfamiliar grasping hands of panic wrap around him. He sought an escape, the crowds of happy humanity suddenly cloying.

He heard Steve rush to catch up, his footsteps slowing as Loki ducked into an alley, away from the press of holiday shoppers.

"Loki? Are you okay? What the hell?!" Steve's words cut off as Loki slammed him into the brick wall of the alley, stealing the air away from him as Loki leaned his arm against Steve's throat. This close to Steve, he could see the pulse of distressed arteries in his neck, the drops of melted snow on his eyelashes.

Confusion swam in Steve's eyes as he fought for the small amount of air Loki allowed him. Steve wasn't ready to fight him yet, preventing his own sense of self-preservation, which, if Loki knew anything at all about Steve, it was that he'd become an expert at suppressing that particular reflex.

"_Fool_," Loki hissed, leaning in harder, fully cutting Steve's access to oxygen. Wariness replaced confusion and his face shuttered closed, and Loki saw his opponent there again, in calculating eyes and hardened face.

He felt Steve's muscles tense and he relaxed, anticipating the blow that followed, oddly glad that Steve was going to fight back.

He'd known the blow was coming, but the speed and force behind it surprised him. His head whipped to the side, Steve's fist connecting with his mouth, his teeth ripping against his lip. He tasted iron in his mouth, and spat blood onto the snow.

Steve used the opportunity to get away from the wall and put space between them, his arms held up defensively.

"What's gotten into you?"

"What have you done to me?" He hissed, wiping the trickling blood from his mouth.

"What?" Steve dropped his arms slightly, bewilderment stamped on his face, which only served to enrage Loki further.

He had been _so careful_ his entire life not to grow close to another, unwilling to bear familiarity of one he was doomed to kill.

Loki could see the uncertainty in the hold of Steve shoulders. Steve had never been a match for him, even on his best day and with his shield. After over a year of watching him in battle, Loki knew Steve's moves before Steve did.

_A year_, a voice whispered in Loki's head. _And he's only ever shown kindness_. Loki ignored it.

"What _curse_ is this?" he shouted at Steve, green magic sparking between his fingertips, overcome by the desire to _hurt_ Steve, to kill them both before he lived with their bond another day. "What trickery?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Steve insisted, throwing up his arms in attempt to block Loki's magic. It was a useless gesture and they both knew it.

Engulfed in green light, Steve slammed up against the far wall of the alley. He struggled to stay upright as the magic faded around him.

The glamor faded from Loki's walking stick. He'd lost the tesseract, but the staff had been a focus for his powers long before the inclusion of the stone, and he was no worse off without it.

He stalked towards Steve and hefted him up by his collar.

"Who put you up to this? Who promised you reward for my fall?" Loki shouted, throwing Steve against the wall. Loki had never been known for his physical prowess, but even the weakest Jotun could best the strongest human.

Steve kicked out, but Loki caught it. He slammed Steve against the bricks, his head snapping back against the wall with a _crack_. Loki delivered a right hook, driving Steve's head into the bricks. Mortar crumbled around them, blood smearing into the bricks and dripping to mix with the slush on the ground.

Steve attempted another swing, but Loki caught it with an open hand, wrapping his hands around Steve's fist and shoving his arm against the wall.

"No one put me up to this," Steve's voice was clogged with blood from his nose, the cartilage folded and broken.

Loki grasped Steve's chin and held his head up, searching his eyes for some indication of the lie and found pupils mismatched.

"I thought—" Steve trailed off.

"What did you think? That I was some broken toy to be fixed?" Loki roared, slamming Steve up against the wall again. Loki wasn't sure if the crack that followed was brick or bone, and a part of him screamed to stop, but another part, one filled with centuries of reading sagas and knowledge of a Ragnarök where Steve was never mentioned screamed louder_._

_Kill him now_, before he grew even closer, before Loki was doomed to kill him later.

If he succeeded while still bonded, they would both be done, and their story erased from the annuals of history yet to pass. He would finally be free from the machinations of others.

"No." Steve raised his head. One eye had already begun to swell shut, a cut on his hairline coating his face in blood. "I saw myself in you."

Loki screamed in outrage, throwing Steve to the ground and kicking him. This time, he felt the ribs splinter and knew the _crack _that resounded throughout the alleywas bone. Steve folded around his ribs in an effort to protect them.

"We were never meant to be friends. You've trapped me," Loki seethed, glaring down at Steve.

"Will you kill us both? Will that ease your guilt?" Steve pushed himself up on his arm, struggling to a sitting position, his one good eye catching Loki's own. Loki was expecting hate, _hoping_ for it, but his face was closed.

He was a good card player, after all.

Steve spent a moment fighting for oxygen before he struggled to stand, using the crumbling wall for support. Loki watched him stumble, falling to his knees before he started again.

_Stay down!_ He wanted to shout. _Don't you know when you're beaten?_

"Do you think that growing close to another is grounds for murdering them?" Steve continued through gritted teeth as he managed a standing position.

One arm wrapped around his ribs and he leaned against the wall, his breaths shallow and labored. He winced as he straightened.

"Or are you so scared of no longer being the villain that you're willing to kill your friends so you can regain 'number one most wanted'? What's your plan? To go back and attack everyone else at the Tower, just to prove how much of a bad guy you are?"

"Haven't you called them already to your rescue?" Loki crossed his arms. "Shouldn't I be expecting your team of hardheaded righteous assholes any moment?"

"No," Steve wiped the blood from his face. "I haven't."

Loki peered at Steve, trying to ascertain his motives. It was a foolish move, leaving his team in the dark.

Steve couldn't beat Loki, not without his suit, and certainly not without his shield. Loki knew Steve knew it. It didn't make sense.

"You _want_ to die," Loki realized.

Steve's face fell for just a moment before hardening again, and Loki wondered if he'd imagined it.

"No, I don't want _you_ to," Steve returned, wincing as he coughed blood, his arm tightening around his ribs as they moved in opposition. "There's no army of Chitauri to distract them. You couldn't win against the Hulk before, and you don't stand a chance against the whole team with nothing to hold them back."

Loki sneered, but he knew Steve was right. Worse, Steve had shown compassion in the middle of a losing fight.

"I _hate_ you."

"You don't," Steve looked at him wearily. "That's the problem, isn't it? You came here hoping you'd find a way to break our bond and kill us all, and instead we're not half so bad as you imagined and that scares you."

Steve had known Loki's motives all along, and he'd taken him in anyway.

"You're presumptuous," Loki hissed, turning to leave. He planned his next jump, somewhere remote and cold.

"No, I'm right, and that's worse."

It was the last thing Loki heard before he landed in expansive ice fields of the artic, the winter wind tearing at his scarf and raking across his face.

He sank into the icy snow, memories of his last incursion into a snow scape washing over him. Sinking his head into his hands, he cursed himself.

Even in defeat, Steve had won.

Steve had slipped past his defenses and into his soul, filling the parts Loki had never known were missing and replacing them with open smiles and omelets and meandering walks through the city.

Loki ran a hand through his hair, puzzling out his next move. He needed to see Frigga. This was her magic. She had made it and she could undo it. He stood up, his claws finding traction. He didn't need to look at his skin to know it had become a deep blue: that his nails were long and teeth unnaturally sharp.

Loki had hoped to find solace in the cold, but instead he was overcome by memories of Steve. In their first meeting, Steve had refused to cow to Loki or to panic in the midst of the element that frightened him the most.

At the time, Loki had found him full of false bravado, but it was only later that he'd understood it had been courage.

The wind whipped around him, twisting his long coat around him.

He didn't know where to go. He knew that if he returned to Steve, his bonded would accept him with understanding. Even worse than the cold, Steve was afraid of being alone, of losing another he'd allowed to call friend. Steve, for all his amicability was slow to let another in. Loki had won the battle and lost the war. Steve had accepted him as he was, and the betrayal didn't bring the victory he'd hoped. Loki balled his fists, his claws digging into the palms.

Even now, he could hear Steve chiding him for buying into the Sagas as some sort of law.

Despite their numerous arguments over Loki's part in Ragnarok, Steve always insisted that he could be free.

Every road led to Ragnarök.

Every road led to Steve.

Loki wondered if Steve was right. He hadn't thought to look at the Sagas since his arrival on Earth, so he encompassed was he with the passages of Steve's fictional Bible, of Banner's library of writing: a million stories where the characters lead any life they chose.

Humanity's stories were full of people who knew their fate and rebelled against it all the same. As if Fate was something so easily discarded. He wanted to tell them, "Don't you know? None of you matter. You're just a preoccupation."

But Banner was doomed to be a mindless, rage-fueled monster, and he read books and saved children in India. Stark was supposed to wallow in an alcohol-fueled spiral of despair, and instead he created magnificent technologies that furthered his race.

Romanov was only meant to be an assassin, and she'd fooled Loki so she could save her planet. And even in the midst of Loki's possession, Barton had fought against him, and Loki realized belatedly that it wasn't the people that Loki had Barton killed that made him hate Loki so: it was that he hadn't been allowed to choose.

Loki collapsed onto the ice, and wondered if he could break through the bonds that trapped him if he managed even half of the courage that any of the Avengers showed.

"I don't want to be your pawn anymore," he raged to the Fates, and he realized, suddenly, they were the gods he prayed to, had spent a lifetime bargaining with.

The Fates didn't answer—they never had—and the wind was a lonely companion if one he knew well, and he realized that this snowscape could not be the refuge he sought.

He was planning his trip back to Steve, hoping he could repair things between them, knowing he wouldn't even have to ask when he felt a piercing, tearing pain in his chest, his breath torn from him. His hand flew to his chest, fingers clasping around the phantom pain.

"What—?" But he knew. He'd left Steve alone in that alley, and something had happened to his bonded, and he'd not been there to prevent it.

He felt himself pulled back towards the dirty New York alley, time and space sliding around him in a nauseating blur. The barren, open night sky was replaced by crumbling brick and clouds that glowed red in reflected light.

Beside a dumpster, Steve was slumped against the wall, one hand clasped futilely over a gaping hole in his chest, the other arm laying brokenly beside him, white bone sickly in the yellow light.

A discarded spear lay next to him, Steve's life on it, his blood pouring from the wound it had made, mixing with the grime and the snow and creating a sickly red mush that grew with each beat of his heart.

Sensing Loki's arrival, Steve looked up. His eye was swollen and the right side of his head was matted in a gash but he managed a bloody, relieved smile.

At that moment, Loki felt a worse monster than he had in all his years alive. He'd beaten Steve, and something had happened—someone from his own world had come here to finish what he'd started—and he'd been so _right_ and so_ wrong_ about the Fates' plan.

Loki knew a mortal wound when he saw it: had been responsible for enough of them and witness to countless more. Once, his mother had tried to teach him her healing magic, but he'd rejected her. He was already ridiculed for knowing women's magic and he hadn't wanted to give Thor another reason to make fun of him. Besides, he'd never had any intention of healing another, so what use was the hours it would take to learn the skill? He'd learned enough to heal Steve's plants, but that was it.

It wouldn't have mattered, not with a wound this grievous, but the thought didn't bring him any comfort.

His strength left him with every fading beat of Steve's heart. Stumbling numbly, he made his way to Steve's side. He had to get him home, and he wasn't sure if home was Stark's tower or Asgard, but he knew it wasn't a grimy alley in New York City.

A thousand empty platitudes rushed to Loki's head, and none of them were fitting and all of them lacking.

A bloody hand slapped something into Loki's hand. Loki looked down at the device. Slick and redolent in patriotic colors now smeared in blood, its use was evident. As a joke, Stark had made the most simplistic device imaginable for Steve to use to call the team. A large green button declared in tiny white letters, "Avengers Assemble!" Loki palmed the device.

He'd been willing to kill Steve, but now all he wanted to do was take him home. He'd sought freedom in all the wrong places, and now the only person who had ever accepted him exactly as he was and not who he wanted him to be was paying the price.

"I shall bring you home," Loki swore as tried to scoop Steve up, but his strength was gone. "Hold on."

Pulling Steve into his arms Loki's coat soaked through almost instantly with Steve's blood, he wrapped his arm around Steve's good one. It was clammy and cool, but it gripped back.

The hole in Steve's chest that revealed all the things that should never have been exposed, and it took all of Loki's concentration to move them. The alley faded, slowly replaced by the open sky and familiar stone, Steve's barren garden covered in the growing collection of snow.

Steve let out a sigh that sounded almost like a chuckle; his hand slipping from Loki's to grasp the snow beneath him, staining it red.

"This….is funny," Steve wheezed, but Loki couldn't see why.

The klaxon's of Tony's alarms were grating against the hush that had fallen over the world, but for once Loki was grateful for the comprehensive defense system Tony had built as the Avengers rushed out the door, Thor leading the charge.

Loki sank into the snow beside Steve, his reserves exhausted. Steve toppled over onto his side, his breaths coming uneven and ragged. Blue eyes, always so brilliant in their vivacity were now dull as they met Loki. Loki could see consciousness fading, knew that death was fast approaching. No Valkyrie would be coming to carry them to Valhalla's gated halls.

"Who did this?" Loki shook Steve's shoulder. He'd seen wounds like this on the battlefield. Steve's brow furrowed and he mouthed something, frothy bubbles of blood burbling up around his lips.

The Avengers were on them, their voices too loud, the questions coming too fast. Why wasn't Loki injured? What had happened? Who had done this? Where had Loki been?

"We must get them to my mother." Thor's voice, as familiar as own, was urgent and scared, and Loki didn't have the heart to tell him it didn't matter. They would not survive.

"Why is Loki _blue?"_

"Jesus, Captain! Why didn't he call us?" Barton was resting a hand on Steve's shoulder, his calm veneer shattered.

"He's got a collapsed left lung and a flail segment. Maybe a fractured skull, too. He's lost too much blood." Banner was triaging Steve, his voice cool and analytical but Loki could hear the strain in Banner's voice as he fought against the surging rage the threatened to overwhelm him.

"He can heal himself, can't he?" Stark's voice was thin.

"I need a bandage and some tape. Tony, get me an oxygen tank and a mask. Barton, cut away his clothes." Banner's voice was forceful in a way Loki had never heard before, and he marveled at his levelheadedness.

One of Tony's little robots was already there with an entire first aid kit, and Loki whispered thanks to JARVIS. Bruce tore a bandage open, slapping it to Steve's chest as he ordered Tony to hold it. Ripping tape off, he applied the sterile linen to Steve's chest, leaving one side untaped.

Loki felt Thor's arms wrap around him. Loki struggled against him, but that only served for him to grasp tighter.

"Shh," Thor's voice rumbled in his chest. "I'm bringing you home. Get Steve," Thor ordered over his shoulder, "and be quick about it."

"Brother," Loki pulled on Thor. In the many months since he'd arrived at the tower, he'd made every attempt to stay clear of Thor and his searching questions. Thor's confusion and hurt were eventually replaced with a contentment that seemed to stem simply from being near a brother he loved and was no longer actively attempting to kill him.

Suddenly all the months ignoring the brother that had only ever wanted to share his affection just seemed incredibly petty, and Loki couldn't even remember the point he'd been trying to make.

Thor's eyes were bright with unshed tears, and Loki reached a hand up to wipe them away before they fell.

"You were never meant to cry for me," Loki marveled.

Thor laughed wetly.

"Brother, you may be the smarter than I, but there are things you will never understand. Now hold tight, I've got you."

Loki felt Thor shift to free his arm. Clenching it, his muscles corded tight as he raised Mjölnir and shouted, "Heimdall!"

The intense light of the rainbow bridge engulfed them, and Loki felt himself pulled back to the world he'd spent his whole life trying to escape.

END

Continued here, in "The Fall of Steve Rogers" : s/10017307/1/The-Fall-of-Steve-Rogers

A/N

"This is funny" were the dying words of Doc Holliday, one of the Wild West's best gunslingers. Having been diagnosed with TB, he'd traveled West. There, he became skilled in cards and fighting. He'd intended to die at the hand of another, but became so good at what he did that he ended up dying from TB after all.

"That which is eternal cannot die, yet with strange aeons, even death may die." is from Lovecraft's _Nameless City_. Published in 1928, there's a good chance Steve would have read it.

Also, some of you may have noticed that Steve's Christianity plays a heavy part in his character. In the Avengers, when Steve makes that comment, "There's only one God…." I thought it was pretty cheesy. But I realized Christianity was probably a big part of his childhood, and as they say: there's no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. More importantly, there's an unlimited resource of Christian mythology (and if you take exception to that word, I apologize) unrelated to that written in the Bible. Most significantly are the American influences, which presses an import on the River Jordan. This plays an important part in the next story arc.

Also, I might be a bad person for not clicking the "major character death" warning, but in addition to it being a spoiler, the story isn't done.

I know that this is several months behind the original story, but my inclination is to get everything completely written and edited before posting. Several dozens of pages have been cut from this version, and several more added. The next arc, "Lonesome Traveler" is undergoing major rewrites as I write this, so it's anyone's best guess when it'll be posted, but please rest assured, I'll get it up as soon as it's done!

Also, this couldn't be done without the best beta in the world, Valylene. In the subsequent months since becoming my editor, she's also become a great friend. She's spent so many hours working on this to make sure it's as good a piece of writing as it could be. Any errors are entirely my own.


End file.
